Viscous fingering of miscible slices

Viscous fingering of a miscible high viscosity slice of fluid displaced by a lower viscosity fluid is studied in porous media by direct numerical simulations of Darcy's law coupled to the evolution equation for the concentration of a solute controlling the viscosity of miscible solutions. In contrast with fingering between two semi-infinite regions, fingering of finite slices is a transient phenomenon due to the decrease in time of the viscosity ratio across the interface induced by fingering and dispersion processes. We show that fingering contributes transiently to the broadening of the peak in time by increasing its variance. A quantitative analysis of the asymptotic contribution of fingering to this variance is conducted as a function of the four relevant parameters of the problem, i.e., the log-mobility ratio R, the length of the slice l, the Peclet number Pe, and the ratio between transverse and axial dispersion coefficients epsilon. Relevance of the results is discussed in relation with transport of viscous samples in chromatographic columns and propagation of contaminants in porous media. (c) 2005 American Institute of Physics.