Circular invasion of fluid into a quenched disordered media

TL;DR

This study investigates the dynamic interface behavior during circular fluid invasion in a disordered medium, revealing non-universal scaling and proposing a modified EW model to capture the observed phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a modified Edwards-Wilkinson equation tailored for circular invasion with a moving boundary, accounting for volume conservation and interface dynamics.

Findings

No universal power law observed in interface scaling.

The interface spectrum amplitude decreases with angular momentum.

The proposed model accurately predicts experimental features.

Abstract

The Hele-Shaw experiment is performed with a circular invasion to study the scaling and dynamic behavior of the interface. We did not find any universal power law. The time exponent varies with the range of scale, as has been reported in the literature but not captured by existing models. We ascribe this distinct difference from the planar injection to the fact that our interface size grows with time. This renders the old geometries being constantly pushed apart to leave rooms for new features. As a result, the amplitude of the interface spectrum will decrease with the angular momentum, different from that of a white noise commonly assumed for the planar injection. Due to the moving boundary, the existing Kardar-Parisi-Zhang and Edwards-Wilkinson (EW) equations can no longer be applied. We propose a modified EW equation that not only conserves the fluid volume, but is also capable of predicting all the above features. Two phenomenological coefficients are introduced to represent the competing trend of instability and smoothness. Their dependence on the microscopic parameters are determined from dimensional arguments, and their estimated values conform with the experiments.