Nonuniversality in Imbibition

TL;DR

This paper investigates how evaporation influences the growth of interfaces in 2D porous media during imbibition, revealing nonuniversal behavior and proposing a new model that accounts for evaporation and particle size effects.

Contribution

It introduces the first imbibition model explicitly incorporating evaporation effects and demonstrates how evaporation alters interface growth dynamics in porous media.

Findings

Interface correlation function depends on evaporation rate.

Model shows self-organization of the imbibition interface.

Experimental results confirm nonuniversal growth exponents.

Abstract

We report an imbibition experiment in 2D random porous media in which height - height correlation function grows with a nonuniversal exponent; rather it depends on evaporation. We present an imbibition model which is consistent with the experiment. It also takes account of the size of the diffusing particles and can easily be extended to study multicomponent systems. The model also shows self-organisation of the interface. To our knowledge this is the first model of imbibition which explicitly allows for evaporation.