On the influence of boundary conditions on flows in porous media (Q5927555)

This article studies initial-boundary value problems for nonlinear parabolic equations in one dimension, modeling the displacement of oil by water in a porous medium. The water is injected at the inlet of the medium, and oil flux comes out at the outlet boundary. The authors show that the flux boundary condition at the inlet is more adapted than the Dirichlet boundary condition. The large-time behavior of solutions is shown to be related to the flux strength. Roughly speaking, if the flux exhibits quadratic nonlinearity, the solutions decay as \(t^{-1}\) as time \(t\) goes to infinity, while the linear flux generates the extinction phenomenon, i.e. solutions vanish at finite time.