Instability Problems and Density-Driven Convection in Saturated Porous Media Linking to Hydrogeology: A Review

Abstract

Investigations of fluid instability and density-driven convection in soils and rocks are motivated by both natural phenomena giving rise to ecological problems, and human activities. Knowledge about the admixture transportation by underground fluid flows driven by the gravity force is relevant, for example, to succeed in preventing degradation of soil quality or to improve the efficiency of carbon capture and sequestration technologies. We focus on fully saturated porous media containing two-component miscible fluid systems and consider the dynamic processes, which can be reduced to one of three principal problems, namely one-sided convection, two-sided convection, or convection caused by evaporation. This work reviews the main achievements in the field with more attention to the recent literature. Dependence of the convection onset on perturbations of physical parameters, asymmetric development of the Rayleigh–Taylor instability, appearance of salt drops under the evaporation surface, and other important findings are reported in the review.