Roughness and intermittent dynamics of imbibition fronts due to capillary and permeability disorder.

We follow the propagation of an air-liquid interface during forced-flow imbibition of a viscous wetting liquid by a random medium, using a high resolution fast camera. Our model disordered medium mimics an open fracture by a Hele-Shaw cell with a two-valued gap spacing randomly distributed in the fracture (or Hele-Shaw) plane. By systematically varying the imposed flow rate we achieve average imbibition front velocities in the range 0.057