Interfaces of Phase Transition and Disappearance and Method of Negative Saturation for Compositional Flow with Diffusion and Capillarity in Porous Media

The specific case of interfaces separating a single-phase fluid and a two-phase continuum appears in the theory of compositional flow through porous media. They are usually called the interfaces of phase transition ( PT -interfaces) or the interfaces of phase disappearing ( PD -interfaces). The principle of equivalence is proved which shows that a single-phase multi-component fluid may be replaced by an equivalent fictitious two-phase fluid having specific properties. The equivalent properties are such that the extended saturation of a fictitious phase is negative. This principle enables us to develop the uniform system of two-phase equations in the overall domain in terms of the extended saturation (the NegSat model), and to apply the direct numerical simulation. In the case with diffusion, the uniform NegSat model contains a new term proportional to the gradient of saturation in the relation for flow velocity. The canonical NegSat model represents a transport equation with discontinuous nonlinearities. The qualitative analysis of this model shows that the PT-interfaces represent the shocks of the extended saturation, or, in some cases, can transform into weak shocks. The diffusion and capillarity do not destroy necessarily the shocks, but change their velocity. The analytical technique is developed which allows capturing PT-shocks. The method is illustrated by several examples of miscible gas injection in oil reservoir. In two-dimensional case, the effects of multiple shock collisions in heterogeneous media are automatically modeled. In the case of immiscible fluids and a classic interface, the suggested method converges to the VOF-method.