Soft Matter and Complex Systems Seminar

In nature evolution of dissolution patterns in porous material, such as cave or river formation, takes thousand of years. By numerically solving Darcy's law for fluid flow combined with advection-dispersion-reaction equation for the dissoultion agent, one can track the evolving dissolution patterns. There are two options to verify accuracy of numerical simulations, performed approximations and assumptions. One can wait very, very long time for the dissolution pattern to evolve in the field or perform many small-scale dissolution experiments. During the talk I will present several types of microfluidic experiments of gypsum dissolution which can serve as benchmarks for numerical code verification. This tabletop experiments can help us in understanding formation of geological dissolution patterns.