A MOVING BOUNDARY PROBLEM IN A STOCHASTIC MEDIUM (Q4528534)

The authors consider the flow of an incompressible fluid in a heterogeneous, isotropic porous medium. The flow is described by the equation \(\frac{\partial\theta}{\partial{t}}=\div(K\nabla\rho)+\xi\), where \(\theta=\theta(t,x)\) is the saturation of the fluid, \(\xi=\xi(t,x)\) is the source rate, \(K=K(x)\geq 0\) is the permeability of the medium, \(p=p(t,x)\) is the pressure of the fluid. Suppose that a fluid is pumped into a medium at a known rate and that there is a known initial wet region \(\mathcal{D}(0)\) (the region filled with the fluid) at time \(t=0\). What will be the wet region, \(\mathcal{D}(t)\), at a time \(t>0\) and what will be the pressure, \(p(t,x), x\in\mathcal{D}(t)\)? The model is discussed for fluid flow when the explicit values of the permeability are unknown and only the probability distribution is known. More precisely, a stochastic permeability is represented by some positive white noise functional. The stochastic version of the main equation has the form \[ \frac{\partial\theta}{\partial{t}}=\div(K\diamondsuit\nabla\rho)+\xi, \] where \(\diamondsuit\) denotes the Wick product and \(\xi\in (S)_{-1,-k}\). It is deduced that a weak solution of a moving boundary-value problem must solve a family of stochastic variational inequalities. Then the existence and uniqueness of solutions for these inequalities is demonstrated. In the last section the authors investigate to what extent one can deduce physical properties of the moving boundary from this solution.