Abstract
The highly ramified patterns1,2 produced by the flow of a reactive fluid through a soluble porous medium have never been quantitatively described. The theoretical understanding of this phenomenon is limited to very simple conditions (such as the flow of a liquid through a; capillary3) due to the complexity of the coupling between the chemical reaction and the fluid flow. We show here that the dissolution patterns (DP) obtained experimentally by injecting water through pure plaster are fractal, for different geometries of the samples. In two dimensions, these DP are remarkably'similar to patterns associated with diffusion-limited aggregation4–6 (DLA), that is, dielectric breakdown7, viscous fingering8,9 and diffusion-limited polymerization10. In three dimensions, we compare them with DLA clusters grown in the same boundary conditions and find a good qualitative and quantitative similarity. These results should be of interest in different areas where chemical dissolution of porous media by a flowing fluid occurs, for example, in nature (the formation of caves) and in industry (in the oil industry where acids are routinely injected into oil reservoirs).
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Daccord, G., Lenormand, R. Fractal patterns from chemical dissolution. Nature 325, 41–43 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1038/325041a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/325041a0
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