An Investigation of the Flow Regime for Hele-Shaw Flow

Abstract Hele-Shaw cells are used to model creeping flow through porous media (where Darcy's law is valid). The effects of inertia on flow about obstructions in a Hele-Shaw cell can be calculated by a perturbation method if one can determine a solution to Laplace's equation. Results of a computer solution for flow about circular, square and elliptical obstructions are presented These results show that for a modified presented These results show that for a modified Reynolds number of less than 1, the inertia terms are small; and for values of less than 3, the average streamline predicts the ideal flow. Therefore, the analogy might be used for studying flow in porous media up to a modified Reynolds number of at least 3. Introduction The nature of fluid flow in porous media is of interest in the fields of soil mechanics, ground water flow, petroleum production, filtration and flow, in packed beds. Because it is very difficult to study the phenomenological behavior of flow in porous media, homologs and analogs are used to study flow characteristics. A Hele-Shaw model, made of two closely spaced plates - usually glass - is often used as an analogy to two-dimensional flow in porous media. Hele-Shaw showed experimentally that the streamline configuration for creeping flow around an obstacle located between two closely spaced parallel plates is the same as for two-dimensional parallel plates is the same as for two-dimensional ideal flow about the same obstacle. Stokes verified these observations mathematically. The usual equation of motion for flow in porous media is Darcy's law. The form of the mathematical statement of Darcy's law is identical, within a multiplicative constant, to the expression for the average velocity over the place gap in the plane of a Hele-Shaw model. These models may be used to describe flow in both homogeneous and heterogeneous porous media.