The Three-Phase Polymer Model in Porous Media

Glimm &Isaacson in 1981 modeled the immiscible two-phase flow of oil with polymer added to increase the water viscosity. Later we included the gas phase in the model and studied the Riemann solution for the augmented \(3\,\times \,3\) system of conservation laws. We show in this work that the wave curve method is powerful enough to be extended and deal with such a system, even in the case of realistic capilarity viscosities. Because of the relevance of immiscible three phase flow in Petroleum Engineering even the partial results presented here are welcome.