No Arabic abstract
Recent experiments demonstrate how a soluble body placed in a fluid spontaneously forms a dissolution pinnacle -- a slender, upward pointing shape that resembles naturally occurring karst pinnacles found in stone forests. This unique shape results from the interplay between interface motion and the natural convective flows driven by the descent of relatively heavy solute. Previous investigations suggest these structures to be associated with shock-formation in the underlying evolution equations, with the regularizing Gibbs-Thomson effect required for finite tip curvature. Here, we find a class of exact solutions that act as attractors for the shape dynamics in two and three dimensions. Intriguingly, the solutions exhibit large but finite tip curvature without any regularization, and they agree remarkably well with experimental measurements. The relationship between the dimensions of the initial shape and the final state of dissolution may offer a principle for estimating the age and environmental conditions of geological structures.
A reactive fluid dissolving the surface of a uniform fracture will trigger an instability in the dissolution front, leading to spontaneous formation of pronounced well-spaced channels in the surrounding rock matrix. Although the underlying mechanism is similar to the wormhole instability in porous rocks there are significant differences in the physics, due to the absence of a steadily propagating reaction front. In previous work we have described the geophysical implications of this instability in regard to the formation of long conduits in soluble rocks. Here we describe a more general linear stability analysis, including axial diffusion, transport limited dissolution, non-linear kinetics, and a finite length system.
We investigate the chemical dissolution of porous media using a network model in which the system is represented as a series of interconnected pipes with the diameter of each segment increasing in proportion to the local reactant consumption. Moreover, the topology of the network is allowed to change dynamically during the simulation: as the diameters of the eroding pores become comparable with the interpore distances, the pores are joined together thus changing the interconnections within the network. With this model, we investigate different growth regimes in an evolving porous medium, identifying the mechanisms responsible for the emergence of specific patterns. We consider both the random and regular network and study the effect of the network geometry on the patterns. Finally, we consider practically important problem of finding an optimum flow rate that gives a maximum increase in permeability for a given amount of reactant.
The extent and the morphology of ice forming in a differentially heated cavity filled with water is studied by means of experiments and numerical simulations. We show that the main mechanism responsible for the ice shaping is the existence of a cold upward convective current in the system. Such a current is ascribed to the peculiar equation of state of water, i.e., the non-monotonous dependence of density with temperature. The precise form of the ice front depends on several factors, first the temperature difference across the cell which drives the convection, second the wall inclination with respect to the vertical, both of which are here explored. We propose a boundary-layer model and a buoyancy-intensity model which account for the main features of the ice morphology.
Thermal plumes are the energy containing eddy motions that carry heat and momentum in a convective boundary layer. The detailed understanding of their structure is of fundamental interest for a range of applications, from wall-bounded engineering flows to quantifying surface-atmosphere flux exchanges. We address the aspect of Reynolds stress anisotropy associated with the intermittent nature of heat transport in thermal plumes by performing an invariant analysis of the Reynolds stress tensor in an unstable atmospheric surface layer flow, using a field-experimental dataset. Given the intermittent and asymmetric nature of the turbulent heat flux, we formulate this problem in an event-based framework. In this approach, we provide structural descriptions of warm-updraft and cold-downdraft events and investigate the degree of isotropy of the Reynolds stress tensor within these events of different sizes. We discover that only a subset of these events are associated with the least anisotropic turbulence in highly-convective conditions. Additionally, intermittent large heat flux events are found to contribute substantially to turbulence anisotropy under unstable stratification. Moreover, we find that the sizes related to the maximum value of the degree of isotropy do not correspond to the peak positions of the heat flux distributions. This is because, the vertical velocity fluctuations pertaining to the sizes associated with the maximum heat flux, transport significant amount of streamwise momentum. A preliminary investigation shows that the sizes of the least anisotropic events probably scale with a mixed-length scale ($z^{0.5}lambda^{0.5}$, where $z$ is the measurement height and $lambda$ is the large-eddy length scale).
Chemical reactions can accelerate, slow down or even be at the very origin of the development of dissolution-driven convection in partially miscible stratifications, when they impact the density profile in the host fluid phase. We numerically analyze the dynamics of this reactive convective dissolution in the fully developed non-linear regime for a phase A dissolving into a host layer containing a dissolved reactant B. We show that for a general A+B$rightarrow$C reaction in solution, the dynamics vary with the Rayleigh numbers of the chemical species, i.e. with the nature of the chemicals in the host phase. Depending on whether the reaction slows down, accelerates or is at the origin of the development of convection, the spatial distributions of species A, B or C, the dissolution flux and the reaction rate are different. We show that chemical reactions enhance the steady-state flux as they consume A and can induce more intense convection than in the absence of reactions. This result is important in the context of CO$_2$ geological sequestration where quantifying the storage rate of CO$_2$ dissolving into the host oil or aqueous phase is crucial to assess the efficiency and the safety of the project.