SMALL SCALE STRUCTURE OF DIPHASIC FLOWS THROUGH POROUS MEDIA.

The forces in action during waterflooding of a petroleum reservoir most often conflict with one another rather than acting in a concerted way to help in the desired extraction of the resource. A simple model has been studied experimentally with considerable success for the case of nonwetting fluid displacing wetting fluid in two-dimensional artificial media. Efforts to do experiments in three-dimensional media will also be reported. For the opposite flow situation, many complications in the detailed flow dynamics have surfaced, and interesting new percolation-like theoretical ideas which have subsequently emerged to deal with these complications will be discussed.