Steam Injection into Water-Saturated Porous Rock

C. J. van Duijn | Bruining, Johannes | Marchesin, Dan

Keywords: Porous Medium | steamflood | travelling waves | multiphase flow

We formulate conservation laws governing steam injection in a linear porous medium containing water. Heat losses to the outside are neglected. We study the condensation front as a travelling wave, under the approximation that pressure variations are negligible within this front. We find this travelling wave for the case of injection of high quality steam using a combination of linearized analysis at equilibria and numerical calculation of orbits. We find a complete and systematic description of all solutions of the Riemann problem for the injection of a mixture of steam and water into a water-saturated porous medium. For ambient pressure, there are three kinds of solutions, depending on injection and reservoir conditions. We show that the solution is unique for each initial data.

Anexos:

• paper.ps