Instabilities

Researchers at Oxford study a wide range of hydrodynamic instabilities and pattern-forming processes to better understand natural systems, improve industrial applications, and develop physical and mathematical insight into these striking phenomena.

For example, the classical Rayleigh-Plateau instability is the process by which a liquid jet or column breaks into individual droplets. Motivated by applications in inkjet printing, Prof. Alfonso Castrejon-Pita has studied fundamental features of droplet pinchoff as well as methods of controlling jet breakup via acoustic excitation.

Another example is viscous fingering, a classical interfacial instability that leads to the formation of fingerlike patterns when one fluid displaces another, more viscous fluid from a porous medium or a Hele-Shaw cell. Motivated by the idea of suppressing or controlling viscous fingering to improve the efficiency of fluidfluid displacement, Prof. Chris MacMinn’s group has studied the role of gas compression in delaying the onset of viscous fingering, the impact of wettability on the morphology of the fingering pattern in a porous medium (collaboration with MIT), and the development of viscous fingering in deformable flow cells (collaboration the University of Manchester).