Diffusive slowdown in miscible viscous fingering (Q2496616)

The authors consider gravity-driven flows in a porous medium with initial conditions close to unstable stratification. They prove a refined upper bound on the size of the mixing layer in a simplified model of miscible fingering that quantifies diffusive slowdown. The studied system is a multi-dimensional system of hyperbolic conservation laws that admits an exact one-dimensional closure for which the Lax entropy condition is not physically appropriate. The proof is based on a study of dynamic scaling in mixing layer and on a construction of comparison functions that are viscous shock profiles for Burger's equation.