Reactive Infiltration Instabilities

When a fluid flow is imposed on a porous medium, the infiltrationflow may interact with the reaction-induced porosity variationswithin the medium and may lead to fingering instabilities. Anonlinear model of such interaction is developed and morphologicalinstability of a planar dissolution front is demonstrated usinga linear stability analysis of a moving-free-boundary problem.The fully nonlinear model is also examined numerically usingfinite-difference methods. The numerical simulations confirmthe predictions of linear stability theory and, more importantly,reveal the growth of dissolution fingers that emerge as a resultof these instabilities