Rayleigh–Taylor instability of immiscible fluids in porous media

The time development of an interface separating two immiscible fluids of different densities in heterogeneous two-dimensional porous media is studied. The governing equations are simplified with the help of approximate Green’s functions which allow computation of the shape of the interface directly without resolving the fluid flow in the entire domain. The new formulation is amenable to numerical approximation, and the reduction in dimension leads to a significant gain in efficiency in the numerical simulation of the interfacial dynamics. Several test cases are investigated, and the numerical solutions are compared to known exact solutions and experimental data.