On the Influence of Weak Heterogeneity of Porous Medium on Rayleigh–Taylor Convection of Miscible Fluids
摘要
Experimental, analytical, and numerical investigations, addressing the onset and development of Rayleigh–Taylor convection in porous media, often give results, which do not agree with each other quantitatively. The reason of this discrepancy can be related to different fields of small perturbations, which always present in a system as a “hidden parameter”. Computational methods provide an opportunity to introduce small perturbations explicitly and investigate the response of fluid system to them. In the present work, numerical study of Rayleigh–Taylor convection of miscible fluids in a weak heterogeneous porous medium is conducted. Small random perturbations of porosity and permeability are considered. It was found that parameters of the convection onset and long-time evolution, which are analyzed statistically, depend on the amplitude of perturbations significantly. Particularly, the convection onset time increases by a factor of 15, if the amplitude of porosity perturbations, normalized by the average porosity, decreases from