Cylindrical effects on Richtmyer-Meshkov instability for arbitrary Atwood numbers in weakly nonlinear regime

Abstract

When an incident shock collides with a corrugated interface separating two fluids of different densities, the interface is prone to Richtmyer-Meshkov instability (RMI). Based on the formal perturbation expansion method as well as the potential flow theory, we present a simple method to investigate the cylindrical effects in weakly nonlinear RMI with the transmitted and reflected cylindrical shocks by considering the nonlinear corrections up to fourth order. The cylindrical results associated with the material interface show that the interface expression consists of two parts: the result in the planar system and that from the cylindrical effects. In the limit of the cylindrical radius tending to infinity, the cylindrical results can be reduced to those in the planar system. Our explicit results show that the cylindrical effects exert an inward velocity on the whole perturbed interface, regardless of bubbles or spikes of the interface. On the one hand, outgoing bubbles are constrained and ingoing spikes are accelerated for different Atwood numbers (A) and mode numbers k'. On the other hand, for ingoing bubbles, when |A|k'3/2≲1, bubbles are considerably accelerated especially at the small |A| and k'; otherwise, bubbles are decelerated. For outgoing spikes, when |A|k'≳1, spikes are dramatically accelerated especially at large |A| and k'; otherwise, spikes are decelerated. Furthermore, the cylindrical effects have a significant influence on the amplitudes of the ingoing spike and bubble for large k'. Thus, it should be included in applications where the cylindrical effects play a role, such as inertial confinement fusion ignition target design.