Direct Statistical Comparison Of Hydrodynamic Mixing Experiments And Simulations

Abstract

Fluid mixing phenomena are dominated by irregular structures induced by flow instabilities, which lead to non-deterministic behavior. Hence, there is no direct. pointwise method to establish the correspondence between experimental data and numerical simulation. Using statistical analysis methods, we examine the correspondence between experimental data and simulations. We examine the detailed structures of mixing experiments and their simulation for the Richtmyer-Meshkov (RM) instability. To examine the compressible RM instability, we use the gas curtain experiment of Rightley et al. [g]. Numerical simulations of both experimental configurations were conducted with a variety of flow codes. The experiment and simulation agree at the scale of the mixing zone width, there is statistically significant disagreement at smaller scales. We hypothesize that subgrid-scale physics andlor details of the numerical integration may explain theses differences.