Relative role of convective and diffusive mixing in the miscible Rayleigh-Taylor instability in porous media

The relative role of convection and diffusion is characterized both numerically and experimentally for porous media flows due to a Rayleigh-Taylor instability of a horizontal interface between two miscible solutions in the gravity field. We show that, though globally convection dominates over diffusion during the nonlinear regime, diffusion can locally be as important as convection and even dominates over lateral convection far away from the fingertips. Our experimental and numerical computations of the temporal evolution of the mixing length, the width of the fingers, and their wavelength are in good agreement and show that the lateral evolution of fingers is governed by diffusion.