SOLUTION TO THE INITIAL BOUNDARY-VALUE PROBLEM FOR THE REGULARIZED BUCKLEY-LEVERETT SYSTEM

We solve the initial boundary-value problem for the regularized Buckley-Leverett system, which describes the flow of two immiscible incompressible fluids through a porous medium. This is the case of the flow of water and oil in an oil reservoir. The system is formed by a hyperbolic equation and an elliptic equation coupled by a vector field which represents the total velocity of the mixture. The regularization is done by means of a filter acting on the velocity field. We consider the critical situation in which we inject pure water into the reservoir. At this critical value for the water saturation, the spatial components of the characteristics of the hyperbolic equation vanish and this motivates the use of a new technique to prove the achievement of the boundary condition for the hyperbolic equation. We treat the case of a horizontal plane reservoir. We also prove that the time averages of the saturation component of the solution converge to one, as the time interval increases indefinitely, for almost all points of the reservoir, with a rate of convergence which depends only on the flux function.