A partially open porous media flow with chaotic advection: towards a model of coupled fields.

In nature, dissipative fluxes of fluid, heat and/or reacting species couple to each other and may also couple to deformation of a surrounding porous matrix. We use the well-known analogy of Hele-Shaw flow to Darcy flow to make a model porous medium with porosity proportional to local cell height. Time- and space-varying fluid injection from multiple source/sink wells lets us create many different kinds of chaotic flows and chemical concentration patterns. Results of an initial time-dependent potential flow model illustrate that this is a partially open flow, in which parts of the material transported by the flow remain in the cell forever and parts pass through with residence time and exit time distributions that have self-similar features in the control parameter space of the stirring. We derive analytically the existence boundary in stirring control parameter space between where isolated fluid regions can and cannot remain forever in the open flow. Experiments confirm the predictions.