Kinetic Simulation of the Rayleigh-Taylor Instability

With the rapid development of numerical methods and computer systems in recent years, it has become possible to model complex multidimensional flows on the basis of the Boltzmann equation. For the first time, numerical simulations of the development of Rayleigh-Taylor instability is performed based on the solution of both the Boltzmann equation and the model kinetic equation. This paper is aimed at the identification of kinetic effects and estimation of the degree of flow non-equilibrium. For this purpose, the distribution functions obtained from kinetic simulations are compared with the Navier-Stokes distribution function.