We study the filling of a dry region (cavity) within a viscous liquid layer on a horizontal plane. In our experiments the cavities are created by removable dams of various shapes surrounded by a silicon oil, and we measure the evolution of the cavity's boundaries after removal of the dams. Experimental runs with circular, equilateral triangular, and square dams result in circular collapse of the cavities. However, dams whose shapes lack these discrete rotational symmetries, for example, ellipses, rectangles, or isosceles triangles, do not lead to circular collapses. Instead, we find that near collapse the cavities have elongated oval shapes. The axes of these ovals shrink according to different power laws, so that while the cavity collapses to a point, the aspect ratio is increasing. The experimental setup is modeled within the lubrication approximation. As long as capillarity is negligible, the evolution of the fluid height is governed by a nonlinear diffusion equation. Numerical simulations of the experiments in this approximation show good agreement up to the time where the cavity is so small that surface tension can no longer be ignored. Nevertheless, the noncircular shape of the collapsing cavity cannot be due to surface tension which would tend to round the contours. These results are supplemented by numerical simulations of the evolution of contours which are initially circles distorted by small sinusoidal perturbations with wave numbers k greater than or equal to 2. These nonlinear stability calculations show that the circle is unstable in the presence of the mode k=2 and stable in its absence. The same conclusion is obtained from the linearized stability analysis of the front for the known self-similar solution for a circular cavity. [S1063-651X(98)04711-4]. [References: 18]
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