Relevance of dynamic wetting in viscous fingering patterns

We demonstrate that wetting effects at moving contact lines have a strong impact in viscous fingering patterns. Experiments in a rotating Hele-Shaw (HS) cell, dry or prewetted, show consistent morphological differences. When the wetting fluid invades a dry region, contact angle dynamics yield a kinetic contribution to the interface pressure drop that scales with capillary number as Ca-2/3 but is significantly larger than the Park-Homsy kinetic correction. Numerical results are in very good agreement with experiments and show that standard HS equations work best for prewetted cells.