Finger behavior of a shear thinning fluid in a Hele-Shaw cell
Soft Condensed Matter
2009-10-31 v1
Abstract
We make a theoretical study of the behavior of a simple fluid displacing a shear thinning fluid confined in a Hele-Shaw cell. To study the Saffman-Taylor instability when the displaced fluid is non Newtonian we face the problem of having a field which is non laplacian. By means of an hodographic transformation we are able to solve the problem in the case of weak shear thinning while taking into account the non laplacian character of the equation. Our results predict that the finger width decreases towards zero for small values of the surface tension parameter which is inversely proportional to the finger velocity.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/9807318,
title = {Finger behavior of a shear thinning fluid in a Hele-Shaw cell},
author = {Eugenia Corvera Poire and Martine Ben Amar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/9807318},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 1 figure, RevTeX, to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett