The drilling of oil wells, particularly in offshore environments, is an operation which demands a high cost, thus, the minimization of problems and damage to the producing reservoir is very important. The design of a drilling fluid that ensures minimum invasion into the reservoir rock is a major topic, consequently the oil industry has invested in research in order to prevent this problem from occurring. Therefore, this research studied the displacement of fluids in an ideal porous medium, a Hele-Shaw cell. To accomplish this task, the following two non-Newtonian fluids were used: an aqueous solution of a flexible polymer, polyacrylamide; and the other an aqueous solution of a rigid polymer, xanthan gum. Such non-Newtonian fluids represent the drilling fluid, while the function of oil present in the reservoir rock was represented by mineral oil. From this experiment it is possible to observe the Saffman-Taylor instability or viscous fingers, which is a phenomenon observed when a low viscosity fluid displaces a higher viscosity fluid. This phenomenon is very important in many applications, such as drilling fluid invasion in porous media, secondary and tertiary oil recovery, hydraulic fracturing, polymer processing, hydrology and filtration. The experiment consists in analyzing the evolution of the interface between two fluids through a digital camera, and determining the displacement efficiency qualitatively from the imagens. With the set of images is possible to observe in which dynamic and rheological parameters the transition from fingers (unstable interface) to plug (stable interface) occurs, and vice versa. Also, rheological tests were performed in which it was possible to know the behavior of non-Newtonian fluids used in the study. From the data collected it was observed that both the polyacrylamide and for xanthan gum transition occurs near the dimensionless shear rate of 3.