Relevance of dynamic wetting in viscous fingering patterns.
We demonstrate that wetting effects at moving contact lines have a strong impact in viscous fingering patterns. Experiments in a rotating Hele-Shaw (HS) cell, dry or prewetted, show consistent morphological differences. When the wetting fluid invades a dry region, contact angle dynamics yield a kinetic contribution to the interface pressure drop that scales with capillary number as Ca(2/3) but is significantly larger than the Park-Homsy kinetic correction. Numerical results are in very good agreement with experiments and show that standard HS equations work best for prewetted cells.
Alvarez-Lacalle
E
E
Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
Ortín
J
J
Casademunt
J
J