Viscous fingering and dendritic growth under an elastic membrane

Lucie Ducloué, Andrew L. Hazel, Draga Pihler-Puzović, Anne Juel
2017 Journal of Fluid Mechanics  
We present an experimental investigation of interfacial fingering instabilities in a compliant channel, where the interface can adopt a planar front orthogonal to the direction of propagation over most of the channel width. Finite-length fingers develop on that front, similarly to the previously studied radial configuration with injection of air at constant flow rate (Pihler-Puzović et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 108 (7), 2012, 074502), but, unlike the radial case, the interface propagates
more » ... ily. This allows us to present the first quantification of the nonlinearly saturated fingering pattern and to demonstrate that the morphological features of the fingers are selected in a simple way by the local geometry of the compliant cell. In contrast, the local geometry itself is determined from a complex fluid–solid interaction. Furthermore, we find that changes to the geometry of the channel cross-section lead to a rich variety of possible interfacial patterns.
doi:10.1017/jfm.2017.468 fatcat:ii7cslb6kvajdfxszesvjfepcu