Similarity of Rayleigh-Taylor Instability Development on Scales from 1 mm to One Light Year

Similarity of Rayleigh-Taylor Instability Development on Scales from 1 mm to One Light Year

In this paper, we describe three different phenomena occurring on scales of 1 mm, 100 km, and almost a light year. The smallest scale is a laboratory experiment. The intermediate scale is a rocket-borne space experiment and the largest is an exploding star. In each case, deceleration creates a situation that is unstable to the Rayleigh-Taylor instability. The similarity exists in the spatial an...

Granular Rayleigh-Taylor instability

A granular instability driven by gravity is studied experimentally and numerically. The instability arises as grains fall in a closed Hele-Shaw cell where a layer of dense granular material is positioned above a layer of air. The initially flat front defined by the grains subsequently develops into a pattern of falling granular fingers separated by rising bubbles of air. A transient coarsening ...

numerical simulation of rayleigh-taylor instability

rayleigh-taylor (rt) instability has a growing importance in many fields including aircraft industry and astrophysics. the development and the growth of rt instability were investigated using sinusoidal disturbances with different wavelength at the interface of two fluids. numerical simulations were performed by solving navier-stokes unsteady equations with the vof formulation. results of the 2...

The Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability

Multiple Layer Rayleigh-Taylor Instability

We study a general multiple layer Rayleigh-Taylor instability problem for both compressible and incompressible inviscid uids. Our main result is that many features of a multilayer system are universal, in the sense they do not depend on such details as the number of layers, their thicknesses, equations of state for the uids, and equilibrium density distributions. It is shown that a compressible...