Wormhole growth in soluble porous materials

Abstract
Analytical solutions are derived for the quasisteady shape and speed of a single wormhole resulting from the coupled processes of Darcian fluid motion and chemical dissolution in a soluble permeable material. For an initially unsaturated medium, two-dimensional solutions are obtained by addressing an inverted free-boundary problem in which the spatial coordinates are treated as dependent variables on the plane of a complex potential. For initially saturated materials, solutions are obtained by analogy to Ivantsov’s problem of dendrite growth.