Controlling fingering instabilities in Hele-Shaw flows in the presence of wetting film effects

TL;DR

This study investigates how wetting film effects influence fingering instabilities in Hele-Shaw flows and proposes control strategies for pattern formation using time-dependent injection and lifting protocols.

Contribution

It introduces a nonlinear model incorporating wetting effects and develops control protocols to manage fingering instabilities in Hele-Shaw flows.

Findings

Wetting effects increase the required injection and lifting rates for control.

Proposed control strategies are effective in nonlinear regimes.

Control protocols can prescribe desired pattern morphologies.

Abstract

In this paper, the interfacial motion between two immiscible viscous fluids in the confined geometry of a Hele-Shaw cell is studied. We consider the influence of a thin wetting film trailing behind the displaced fluid, which dynamically affects the pressure drop at the fluid-fluid interface by introducing a nonlinear dependence on the interfacial velocity. In this framework, two cases of interest are analyzed: The injection-driven flow (expanding evolution), and the lifting plate flow (shrinking evolution). In particular, we investigate the possibility of controlling the development of fingering instabilities in these two different Hele-Shaw setups when wetting effects are taken into account. By employing linear stability theory, we find the proper time-dependent injection rate $Q(t)$ and the time-dependent lifting speed ${\dot b}(t)$ required to control the number of emerging fingers during the expanding and shrinking evolution, respectively. Our results indicate that the consideration of wetting leads to an increase in the magnitude of $Q(t)$ [and ${\dot b}(t)$] in comparison to the non-wetting strategy. Moreover, a spectrally accurate boundary integral approach is utilized to examine the validity and effectiveness of the controlling protocols at the fully nonlinear regime of the dynamics and confirms that the proposed injection and lifting schemes are feasible strategies to prescribe the morphologies of the resulting patterns in the presence of the wetting film.