Suppression of viscous fluid fingering: a piecewise constant-injection process

Abstract

The injection of a fluid into another of larger viscosity in a Hele-Shaw cell usually results in the formation of highly branched patterns. Despite the richness of these structures, in many practical situations such convoluted shapes are quite undesirable. In this letter we propose an efficient and easily reproducible way to restrain these instabilities based on a simple piecewise constant pumping protocol. It results in a reduction in the size of the viscous fingers by one order of magnitude.

Published in Phys. Rev. E

References in corpus (2)

• Radial fingering in a Hele-Shaw cell: a weakly nonlinear analysis
• Harmonic moment dynamics in Laplacian growth

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Controlling fingering instabilities in Hele-Shaw flows in the presence of wetting film effects
• Compression-driven viscous fingering in a radial Hele-Shaw cell
• A review of one-phase Hele-Shaw flows and a level-set method for non-standard configurations
• Computational Analysis of Interfacial Dynamics in Angled Hele-Shaw Cells: Instability Regimes
• Modelling finger propagation in elasto-rigid channels
• Hamiltonian formulation towards minimization of viscous fluid fingering
• Electrically-controlled self-similar evolution of viscous fingering patterns in radial Hele-Shaw flows