REVIEW AND PROSPECT OF FINGERING PHENOMENON SIMULATION

The phenomenon,so called "fingering",exists in various displacements during oil/gas production and is essentially a kind of hydrodynamic instability.Thus,it is too difficult to be directly investigated.The history and recent status of the physical and mathematical/numerical simulation of fingering in oil/gas production and related fields are investigated.The application of theories of cellular automata and smoothed particle hydrodynamics to fingering simulation is especially introduced.Furthermore,the tendency of fingering simulation is demonstrated based on the recent limitations from improvement of physical models,lattice-off solution of mathematical/numerical models and cellular automata modeling of complicated fingering.