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Corner and finger formation in Hele-Shaw flow with kinetic undercooling regularisation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2014

MICHAEL C. DALLASTON  and
SCOTT W. McCUE
MICHAEL C. DALLASTON
Affiliation:
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6GG, UNITED KINGDOM
SCOTT W. McCUE
Affiliation:
Mathematical Sciences, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane 4000, AUSTRALIA email: scott.mccue@qut.edu.au
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Abstract

We examine the effect of a kinetic undercooling condition on the evolution of a free boundary in Hele-Shaw flow, in both bubble and channel geometries. We present analytical and numerical evidence that the bubble boundary is unstable and may develop one or more corners in finite time, for both expansion and contraction cases. This loss of regularity is interesting because it occurs regardless of whether the less viscous fluid is displacing the more viscous fluid, or vice versa. We show that small contracting bubbles are described to leading order by a well-studied geometric flow rule. Exact solutions to this asymptotic problem continue past the corner formation until the bubble contracts to a point as a slit in the limit. Lastly, we consider the evolving boundary with kinetic undercooling in a Saffman-Taylor channel geometry. The boundary may either form corners in finite time, or evolve to a single long finger travelling at constant speed, depending on the strength of kinetic undercooling. We demonstrate these two different behaviours numerically. For the travelling finger, we present results of a numerical solution method similar to that used to demonstrate the selection of discrete fingers by surface tension. With kinetic undercooling, a continuum of corner-free travelling fingers exists for any finger width above a critical value, which goes to zero as the kinetic undercooling vanishes. We have not been able to compute the discrete family of analytic solutions, predicted by previous asymptotic analysis, because the numerical scheme cannot distinguish between solutions characterised by analytic fingers and those which are corner-free but non-analytic.

Keywords

Hele-Shaw flowKinetic undercoolingBubble contraction and expansionViscous fingeringCorner formation

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Type
Papers
Information
European Journal of Applied Mathematics , Volume 25 , Issue 6 , December 2014 , pp. 707 - 727
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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