Magnetically-driven Rayleigh-Taylor instability.

摘要

In this thesis, we study the collapse of a cylindrically shaped fluid shell under Lorentz forces created with large axial electric currents. The collapse of this shell suffers a breakdown due to Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instability.; We are interested in the effects of magnetic flux on the growth of this instability. The magnetic diffusion into the fluid is expected to slow the rate of growth of the instability. The analytical formulation involves Maxwell's equations of electrodynamics and Euler's equations of fluid dynamics. Theoretical analysis yielded a set of perturbed first order equations together with analytical boundary conditions. The boundary conditions were derived by applying the Blot-Savart law at perturbed surface and perturbed current, thus avoiding the evaluation of certain vacuum boundary conditions. The governing equations and boundary equations were discretized and remains to be implemented as computer code. We propose a numerical experiment based on the results of this analysis.