Reactive Infiltration Instabilities

Abstract

When a fluid flow is imposed on a porous medium, the infiltration flow may interact with the reaction-induced porosity variations within the medium and may lead to fingering instabilities. A nonlinear model of such interaction is developed and morphological instability of a planar dissolution front is demonstrated using a linear stability analysis of a moving-free-boundary problem. The fully nonlinear model is also examined numerically using finite-difference methods. The numerical simulations confirm the predictions of linear stability theory and, more importantly, reveal the growth of dissolution fingers that emerge as a result of these instabilities