Rayleigh-Taylor instability at a tilted interface in laboratory experiments and numerical simulations

摘要

This article investigates the molecular mixing caused by Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instability of a gravitationally unstable density interface tilted at a small angle to the horizontal. The mixing is measured by the increase in background potential energy, and the mixing efficiency, or fraction of energy irreversibly lost to fluid motion doing work against gravity, is calculated. Laboratory experiments are carried out using saline and fresh water, and modeled with compressible numerical simulations, with a suitable choice of parameters and initial conditions. The experiments show that the high cumulative efficiency of mixing in RT instability at a horizontal interface is only slightly reduced by an interface tilt of up to 10degrees, despite the strong overturning that occurs. Instantaneous mixing efficiencies as high as 0.5-0.6 are measured, when RT instability is active, with lower values of about 0.35 during the subsequent overturning. The numerical simulations capture the most unstable scales and the overturning motion well, but generate more mixing than the experiments, with the instantaneous mixing efficiency remaining at 0.5 for most of the run. The difference may be due to restratification at small scales in the high Prandtl number experiments. [References: 7]