On existence and uniqueness for a coupled system modeling immiscible flow through a porous medium

We consider a system of nonlinear coupled partial differential equations that models immiscible two-phase flow through a porous medium. A primary difficulty with this problem is its degenerate nature. Under reasonable assumptions on the data, and for appropriate boundary and initial conditions, we prove the existence of a weak solution to the problem, in a certain sense, using a compactness argument. This is accomplished by regularizing the problem and proving that the regularized problem has a unique solution which is bounded independently of the regularization parameter. We also establish a priori estimates for uniqueness of a solution. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.