Interface evolution during radial miscible viscous fingering
Name
PhysRevE.92.041003.pdf
Size
3.02 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
6bd59c98cdbbe9c46a2a66da7c57be86
Author(s)
de Anna, Pietro
Juanes, Ruben
Chui, Jane Yuen Yung
Date Issued
October 2015
Journal
Physical Review E
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Chui, Jane Y. Y., Pietro de Anna, and Ruben Juanes. “Interface Evolution During Radial Miscible Viscous Fingering.” Phys. Rev. E 92, no. 4 (October 2015). © 2015 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We study experimentally the miscible radial displacement of a more viscous fluid by a less viscous one in a horizontal Hele-Shaw cell. For the range of tested injection rates and viscosity ratios we observe two regimes for the evolution of the fluid-fluid interface. At early times the interface length increases linearly with time, which is typical of the Saffman-Taylor instability for this radial configuration. However, as time increases, the interface growth slows down and scales as ~t[superscript 1/2], as one expects in a stable displacement, indicating that the overall flow instability has shut down. Surprisingly, the crossover time between these two regimes decreases with increasing injection rate. We propose a theoretical model that is consistent with our experimental results, explains the origin of this second regime, and predicts the scaling of the crossover time with injection rate and the mobility ratio. The key determinant of the observed scalings is the competition between advection and diffusion time scales at the displacement front, suggesting that our analysis can be applied to other interfacial-evolution problems such as the Rayleigh-Bénard-Darcy instability.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.92.041003
