Simulating effects of the permeability anisotropy on the formation of viscous fingers during waterflood operations

The capture of interfacial instabilities during water injection simulations in oil reservoirs is a challenging topic, which requires elaborate techniques, generally able to describe heterogeneities of reservoirs and phenomena associated with the flow of immiscible fluids. This article deals with simulations of viscous fingers in two-phase flows (water-oil) trough heterogeneous and anisotropic porous media, where both heterogeneity and anisotropy are modeled by the three-parameter Kozeny-Carman generalized equation, which was included in a classical model commonly used to simulate immiscible flows during waterflood operations. As main result, this paper presents a sophisticated numerical simulator, which allowed us to perform predictions of high quality, proving to be a suitable tool to describe physical aspects associated with flows in petroleum reservoirs. In fact, our simulations show that the permeability anisotropy can influence the formation and development of immiscible viscous fingering. For example, when water is injected through three different configurations, five-spot, line-drive and inverted five-spot, the results of this study indicate that this anisotropy may impose a significant degree of stabilization to the viscous fingering phenomenon, benefiting oil recoveries under water flooding processes.