The instability of streaming fluids in a porous medium

Abstract

The instability of the plane interface between two uniform, superposed, and streaming fluids through porous media is considered. The configuration is taken to be bottom-heavy. In the absence of surface tension, perturbations transverse to the direction of streaming are found to be unaffected by the presence of streaming if perturbation in the direction of streaming are ignored, whereas for perturbations in all other directions there exists instability for a certain wavenumber range. The surface tension is able to suppress this Kelvin–Helmholtz instability for small wavelength perturbations and the medium porosity reduces the stability range given in terms of a difference in streaming velocities. For the top-heavy configurations, the surface tension stabilizes a certain wavenumber range.