An improved result on Rayleigh–Taylor instability of nonhomogeneous incompressible viscous flows

Abstract

In [F. Jiang, S. Jiang, On instability and stability of three-dimensional gravity driven viscous flows in a bounded domain, Adv. Math., 264 (2014) 831--863], Jiang et.al. investigated the instability of Rayleigh--Taylor steady-state of a three-dimensional nonhomogeneous incompressible viscous flow driven by gravity in a bounded domain $\Omega$ of class $C^2$. In particular, they proved the steady-state is nonlinearly unstable under a restrictive condition of that the derivative function of steady density possesses a positive lower bound. In this article, by exploiting a standard energy functional and more-refined analysis of error estimates in the bootstrap argument, we can show the nonlinear instability result without the restrictive condition.