Contracting bubbles in Hele-Shaw cells

The problem of bubble contraction in a Hele-Shaw cell is studied for the case in which the surrounding fluid is of power-law type. A small perturbation of the radially symmetric problem is first considered, focussing on the behaviour just before the bubble vanishes, it being found that for shear-thinning fluids the radially symmetric solution is stable, while for shear-thickening fluids the aspect ratio of the bubble boundary increases. The borderline (Newtonian) case considered previously is neutrally stable, the bubble boundary becoming elliptic in shape with the eccentricity of the ellipse depending on the initial data. Further light is shed on the bubble contraction problem by considering a long thin HeleShaw cell: for early times the leading-order behaviour is one-dimensional in this limit; however, as the bubble contracts its evolution is ultimately determined by the solution of a Wiener–Hopf problem, the transition between the long thin limit and the extinction limit in which the bubble vanishes being described by what is in effect a similarity solution of the second kind. This same solution describes the generic (slit-like) extinction behaviour for shear-thickening fluids, the interface profiles that generalize the ellipses that characterize the Newtonian case being constructed by the Wiener–Hopf calculation. Mathematics Subject Classification: 35B40, 35R35, 76D27 (Some figures in this article are in colour only in the electronic version)