Confinement-induced stabilization of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability and transition to the unconfined limit.

ABSTRACT: The prevention of hydrodynamic instabilities can lead to important insights for understanding the instabilities' underlying dynamics. The Rayleigh-Taylor instability that arises when a dense fluid sinks into and displaces a lighter one is particularly difficult to arrest. By preparing a density inversion between two miscible fluids inside the thin gap separating two flat plates, we create a clean initial stationary interface. Under these conditions, we find that the instability is suppressed below a critical plate spacing. With increasing spacing, the system transitions from the limit of stability where mass diffusion dominates over buoyant forces, through a regime where the gap sets the wavelength of the instability, to the unconfined regime governed by the competition between buoyancy an

SUBMITTER: Alqatari S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7673797 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature