Numerical simulation of the hydrodynamic instability experiments and flow mixing

Based on the numerical methods of volume of fluid (VOF) and piecewise parabolic method (PPM) and parallel circumstance of Message Passing Interface (MPI), a parallel multi-viscosity-fluid hydrodynamic code MVPPM (Multi-Viscosity-Fluid Piecewise Parabolic Method) is developed and performed to study the hydrodynamic instability and flow mixing. Firstly, the MVPPM code is verified and validated by simulating three instability cases: The first one is a Riemann problem of viscous flow on the shock tube; the second one is the hydrodynamic instability and mixing of gaseous flows under re-shocks; the third one is a half height experiment of interfacial instability, which is conducted on the AWE’s shock tube. By comparing the numerical results with experimental data, good agreement is achieved. Then the MVPPM code is applied to simulate the two cases of the interfacial instabilities of jelly models accelerated by explosion products of a gaseous explosive mixture (GEM), which are adopted in our experiments. The first is implosive dynamic interfacial instability of cylindrical symmetry and mixing. The evolving process of inner and outer interfaces, and the late distribution of mixing mass caused by Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instability in the center of different radius are given. The second is jelly layer experiment which is initialized with one periodic perturbation with different amplitude and wave length. It reveals the complex processes of evolution of interface, and presents the displacement of front face of jelly layer, bubble head and top of spike relative to initial equilibrium position vs. time. The numerical results are in excellent agreement with that experimental images, and show that the amplitude of initial perturbations affects the evolvement of fluid mixing zone (FMZ) growth rate extremely, especially at late times.