Viscous fingering with partially miscible fluids
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PhysRevFluids.2.104001.pdf
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3.04 MB
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Author(s)
Fu, Xiaojing
Cueto-Felgueroso Landeira, Luis
Juanes, Ruben
Date Issued
October 2017
Journal
Physical Review Fluids
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Fu, Xiaojing et al. "Viscous fingering with partially miscible fluids." Physical Review Fluids 2, 10 (October 2017): 104001 © 2017 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Viscous fingering—the fluid-mechanical instability that takes place when a low-viscosity fluid displaces a high-viscosity fluid—has traditionally been studied under either fully miscible or fully immiscible fluid systems. Here we study the impact of partial miscibility (a common occurrence in practice) on the fingering dynamics. Through a careful design of the thermodynamic free energy of a binary mixture, we develop a phase-field model of fluid-fluid displacements in a Hele-Shaw cell for the general case in which the two fluids have limited (but nonzero) solubility into one another. We show, by means of high-resolution numerical simulations, that partial miscibility exerts a powerful control on the degree of fingering: fluid dissolution hinders fingering while fluid exsolution enhances fingering. We also show that, as a result of the interplay between compositional exchange and the hydrodynamic pattern-forming process, stronger fingering promotes the system to approach thermodynamic equilibrium more quickly.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.2.104001
