The complex interaction of liquids, gases and solids is of interest in many areas of geoscience including reservoir management, enhanced oil recovery, hydraulic fracturing, carbon sequestration, and groundwater flow. These interactions are heavily influenced by properties and phenomena, which occur at the pore scale, such as the relative wettability of phases, interfacial physics and capillary actions. A significant amount of insight can be gained by accurately simulating multiphase fluid flow at the pore scale, however this has proven to be a challenging area for existing numerical methods to address.
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Image from "Fluid Mixing from Viscous Fingering" by B. Jha, L. Cueto-Felgueroso, and R. Juanes