Transient growth and symmetrizability in rectilinear miscible viscous fingering

Abstract

The influence of dispersion or equivalently of the Peclet number (Pe) on miscible viscous fingering in a homogeneous porous medium is examined. The linear optimal perturbations maximizing finite-time energy gain is demonstrated with the help of the propagator matrix approach based non-modal analysis (NMA). We show that onset of instability is a monotonically decreasing function of Pe and the onset time determined by NMA emulates the non-linear simulations. Our investigations suggest that perturbations will grow algebraically at early times, contrary to the well-known exponential growth determined from the quasi-steady eigenvalues. One of the over-arching objective of the present work is to determine whether there are alternative mechanisms which can describe the mathematical understanding of the spectrum of the time-dependent stability matrix. Good agreement between the NMA and non-linear simulations is observed. It is shown that within the framework of $$L^2$$-norm, the non-normal stability matrix can be symmetrizable by a similarity transformation and thereby we show that the non-normality of the linearized operator is norm dependent. A framework is thus presented to analyze the exchange of stability which can be determined from the eigenmodes.