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Computational Analysis of Interfacial Dynamics in Angled Hele-Shaw Cells: Instability Regimes

We present a theoretical and numerical study on the (in)stability of the interface between two immiscible liquids, i.e., viscous fingering, in angled Hele-Shaw cells across a range of capillary numbers ($Ca$). We consider two types of angled Hele-Shaw cells: diverging cells with a positive depth gradient and converging cells with a negative depth gradient, and compare those against parallel cells without a depth gradient. A modified linear stability analysis is employed to derive an expression for the growth rate of perturbations on the interface and for the critical capillary number ($Ca_c$) for such tapered Hele-Shaw cells with small gap gradients. Based on this new expression for $Ca_c$, a three-regime theory is formulated to describe the interface (in)stability: (i) in Regime I, the growth rate is always negative, thus the interface is stable; (ii) in Regime II, the growth rate remains zero (parallel cells), changes from negative to positive (converging cells), or from positive to negative (diverging cells), thus the interface (in)stability possibly changes type at some location in the cell; (iii) in Regime III, the growth rate is always positive, thus the interface is unstable. We conduct three-dimensional direct numerical simulations of the full Navier--Stokes equations, using a phase field method to enforce surface tension at the interface, to verify the theory and explore the effect of depth gradient on the interface (in)stability. We demonstrate that the depth gradient has only a slight influence in Regime I, and its effect is most pronounced in Regime III. Finally, we provide a critical discussion of the stability diagram derived from theoretical considerations versus the one obtained from direct numerical simulations.