On the Rayleigh-Taylor instability for two uniform viscous incompressible flows

Abstract

The authors study the Rayleigh-Taylor instability for two incompressible immiscible fluids with or without surface tension, evolving with a free interface in the presence of a uniform gravitational field in Eulerian coordinates. To deal with the free surface, instead of using the transformation to Lagrangian coordinates, the perturbed equations in Eulerian coordinates are transformed to an integral form and the two-fluid flow is formulated as a single-fluid flow in a fixed domain, thus offering an alternative approach to deal with the jump conditions at the free interface. First, the linearized problem around the steady state which describes a denser immiscible fluid lying above a light one with a free interface separating the two fluids, both fluids being in (unstable) equilibrium is analyzed. By a general method of studying a family of modes, the smooth (when restricted to each fluid domain) solutions to the linearized problem that grow exponentially fast in time in Sobolev spaces are constructed, thus leading to a global instability result for the linearized problem. Then, by using these pathological solutions, the global instability for the corresponding nonlinear problem in an appropriate sense is demonstrated.