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Steam condensation waves in water-saturated porous rock

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Abstract

We formulate balance laws governing condensation of steam injected into a linear porous medium containing water. Heat losses to the outside are neglected. Longitudinal heat conduction and capillary effects are taken into account. The condensation process is modeled by a rate equation based on a simple heat-transfer model. We study the condensation front as a traveling wave, under the approximation that pressure variations are negligible within the front. We find this traveling wave for the case of injection of high-quality steam using a combination of phase-plane analysis and numerical calculation of orbits.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dietz Laboratory, Centre of Technical Geoscience, Mijnbouwstraat 120, 2628 RX, Delft, The Netherlands

    Johannes Bruining

  2. Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada, Estrada Dona Castorina 110, 22460-320, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

    Dan Marchesin

  3. Mathematics Department, North Carolina State University, 27695, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Stephen Schecter

Authors
  1. Johannes Bruining
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  2. Dan Marchesin
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  3. Stephen Schecter
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Johannes Bruining.

Additional information

Dedicated to Jorge Sotomayor on his 60th birthday

This work was supported in part by: CNPq under Grant 301532/2003-6, FINEP under CTPETRO Grant 21.01.0248.00; NWO under Fellowship Grant R. 75–389, The Netherlands; NSF under Grant DMS-9973105; IMA (Univ. of Minnesota), Dietz Laboratory (TU Delft, The Netherlands), IMPA (Brazil).

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Bruining, J., Marchesin, D. & Schecter, S. Steam condensation waves in water-saturated porous rock. Qual. Th. Dyn. Syst 4, 205–231 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02970859

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02970859

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