Interacting length scales in the reactive-infiltration instability

The reactive-infiltration instability, which develops when a porous matrix is dissolved by a flowing fluid, contains two important length scales. Here we outline a linear stability analysis that simultaneously incorporates both scales. We show that the commonly used "thin-front" model is a limiting case of a more general theory, which also includes convection-dominated dissolution as another special case. The wavelength of the instability is bounded from below, and lies in the range 1mm to 1km for physically reasonable flow rates and reaction rates. We obtain a closed form for the growth rate when the change in porosity is small.

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