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We compare quantitatively two experimental situations concerning injection of a miscible fluid into an initially jammed granular medium saturated with the same fluid, confined in a Hele-Shaw cell. The two experiments are identical, apart from the interstitial and injected fluid, which is in one case air injected into a dry granular packing, and in the other case silicone oil injected into a dense suspension. In spite of the strong differences regarding the nature of the two fluids, strikingly similar dynamical and geometrical features are identified as functions of the control parameters: cell thickness and applied fluid injection pressure. In both cases an initial hydrodynamically driven decompaction process controls the unjamming and prepares the final displacement process characterized by fingerlike patterns empty of grains. The pattern shapes are comparable. In addition, the mobilities of the coupled fluid-grain flow, rescaled by the interstitial fluid viscosity and grain diameter squared, are of the same range and behave comparably. The mobility proves to depend on the initial solid fraction of the medium. Subtle differences are observed in geometrical aspects like the finger width with respect to the control parameters.

For the Saffman-Taylor instability, the inertia of the fluid may become important for high finger speeds. We investigate the effects of inertia on the width of the viscous fingers experimentally. We find that, due to inertia, the finger width can increase with increasing speed, contrary to what happens at small Reynolds number Re. We find that inertial effects need to be considered above a critical Weber number We. In this case it can be shown that the finger width is governed by a balance between viscous forces and inertia. This allows us to define a modified control parameter 1/B , which takes the corrections due to inertia into account; on rescaling the experimental data with 1/B , they all collapse onto the universal curve for the classical Saffman-Taylor instability. Subsequently, we try to rationalize our observations. Numerical simulations, taking into account a modification of Darcy's law to include inertia, are found to only qualitatively reproduce the experimental findings, pointing to the importance of three-dimensional effects.

Oxidation mechanisms even for rather simple hydrocarbons like heptane consist due to the occurrence of many isomeric structures of thousands of reactions of hundreds of species. The automatic generation of these reaction mechanisms using artificial intelligence means is described. Results are presented for n‐heptane‐air mixtures, where a hand‐written reaction mechanism tested against experimental data is available.

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We study the Saffman-Taylor instability in a granular suspension formed by micrometric beads immersed in a viscous liquid. When using an effective viscosity for the flow of the suspension in the Hele-Shaw cell to define the control parameter of the system, the results for the finger width of stable fingers are found to be close to the classical results of Saffman-Taylor. One observes, however, an early destabilization of the fingers that can be attributed to the discrete nature of the individual grains. Classically, the threshold of destabilization is linked to the noise in the cell and is thus difficult to quantify. We show that the grains represent a "controlled noise" and produce an initial perturbation of the interface with an amplitude proportional to the grain size. The finite amplitude instability mechanism proposed by Bensimon et al. allows us to link this perturbation to the value of the threshold observed.

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