Dynamic Scaling in Miscible Viscous Fingering

We consider dynamic scaling in gravity driven miscible viscous fingering. We prove rigorous one-sided bounds on bulk transport and coarsening in regimes of physical interest. The analysis relies on comparison with solutions to one-dimensional conservation laws, and new scale-invariant estimates. Our bounds on the size of the mixing layer are of two kinds: a naive bound that is sharp in the absence of diffusion, and a more careful bound that accounts for diffusion as a selection criterion in the limit of vanishingly small diffusion. The naive bound is simple and robust, but does not yield the experimental speed of transport. In a reduced model derived by Wooding [20], we prove a sharp upper bound on the size of the mixing layer in accordance with his experiments. Wooding’s model also provides an example of a scalar conservation law where the entropy condition is not the physically appropriate selection criterion.