Fingering instability during fracture of a gel block subjected to shear loading

We report here an alternative kind of fingering instability observed during fracture of an unconfined gel consisting of two cuboids joined by a thin gel disk, and all prepared monolithically. When the blocks are sheared across the joint, fracture ensues with the appearance of fingers at the fracture front. The spacing between the fingers remains independent of the shearing speed, planar shape of the joint, and the shear modulus of gel. Importantly this instability appears without any effect of confinement of the gel block, and its wavelength remains dependent on the lateral size of the disk, in contrast to all known instances of fingering phenomena in confined viscous, elastic, and viscoelastic systems.

Morphological stability of an interface between two non-Newtonian fluids moving in a Hele-Shaw cell

The problem of the morphological stability of an interface in the case of the displacement of one non-Newtonian fluid by another non-Newtonian fluid in a radial Hele-Shaw cell has been considered. Both fluids have been described by the two-parameter Ostwald-de Waele power-law model. The nonzero viscosity of the displacing fluid has been taken into account. A generalized Darcy's law for the system under consideration, as well as an equation for the determination of the critical size of morphological stability with respect to harmonic perturbations (linear analysis), has been derived. Morphological phase diagrams have been constructed, and the region of the parameters in which nonequilibrium reentrant morphological transitions are possible has been revealed.

Tip-splitting instabilities in the channel Saffman-Taylor flow of constant viscosity elastic fluids

Boger fluids are used to study viscous fingering growth in viscoelastic fluids in channel Hele-Shaw flow. We have found that the viscous finger growing in the Boger fluid is unstable to tip splitting at high velocities, in a regime where a Newtonian viscous finger is stable. No fracturelike instabilities were observed. We show that the viscoelastic normal stress differences arising in shear and extensional flow reach very high values at shear and extensional rates comparable to those achieved at the tip of the finger at the onset of tip splitting, and the fluid becomes highly anisotropic. The viscoelastic stress could affect the dynamics of the finger and induce the tip-splitting instability.

Velocity-jump instabilities in Hele-Shaw flow of associating polymer solutions

We study fracturelike flow instabilities that arise when water is injected into a Hele-Shaw cell filled with aqueous solutions of associating polymers. We explore various polymer architectures, molecular weights, and solution concentrations. Simultaneous measurements of the finger tip velocity and of the pressure at the injection point allow us to describe the dynamics of the finger in terms of the "finger mobility," which relates the velocity to the pressure gradient. The flow discontinuities, characterized by jumps in the finger tip velocity, which are observed in experiments with some of the polymer solutions, can be modeled by using a nonmonotonic dependence between a characteristic shear stress and the shear rate at the tip of the finger. A simple model, which is based on a viscosity function containing both a Newtonian and a non-Newtonian component, and which predicts nonmonotonic regions when the non-Newtonian component of the viscosity dominates, is shown to agree with the experimental data.