Fingering of chemical fronts in porous media.
The influence of chemical reactions on the hydrodynamical fingering instability is analyzed for miscible systems in porous media. Using a realistic reaction scheme, it is shown that the stability of chemical fronts towards density fingering crucially depends on the width and the speed of the front which are functions of chemical parameters. The major difference between the pure and chemically driven fingering is that, in the presence of chemical reactions, the dispersion curves do not vary in time which has important practical experimental consequences. Good agreement with recent experimental data is found.
De Wit
A
A
Service de Chimie Physique and Center for Nonlinear Phenomena and Complex Systems, Université Libre de Bruxelles, CP 231, Campus Plaine, 1050 Brussels, Belgium.