Singular effects of surface tension in evolving Hele-Shaw flows

Abstract

In this paper, we present evidence to show that a smoothly evolving zero-surface tension solution of the Hele-Shaw equations can be singularly perturbed by the presence of arbitrarily small non-zero surface tension in order-one time. These effects are explained by the impact of ‘daughter singularities’ on the physical interface, whose formation was suggested in a prior paper (Tanveer 1993). For the case of finger motion in a channel, it is seen that the daughter singularity effect is strong enough to produce the transition from a finger of arbitrary width to one with the selected steady-state width in O(1) time.