Ensemble distribution for immiscible two-phase flow in porous media

Phys Rev E. 2017 Feb;95(2-1):023116. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.95.023116. Epub 2017 Feb 27.

Abstract

We construct an ensemble distribution to describe steady immiscible two-phase flow of two incompressible fluids in a porous medium. The system is found to be ergodic. The distribution is used to compute macroscopic flow parameters. In particular, we find an expression for the overall mobility of the system from the ensemble distribution. The entropy production at the scale of the porous medium is shown to give the expected product of the average flow and its driving force, obtained from a black-box description. We test numerically some of the central theoretical results.