A comparative numerical study of the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability with nonlinear analysis in two and three dimensions

X. L. Li and Q. Zhang Citation: Phys. Fluids 9, 3069 (1997); doi: 10.1063/1.869415 View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.869415 View Table of Contents: http://pof.aip.org/resource/1/PHFLE6/v9/i10 Published by the American Institute of Physics.

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A comparative numerical study of the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability with nonlinear analysis in two and three dimensions
X. L. Lia)
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Indiana 46202

Q. Zhang
Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, SUNY at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York 11794

Received 10 December 1996; accepted 3 June 1997 A shock driven inter-facial instability, known as the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability, is studied numerically in two and three dimensions and in the nonlinear regime. The numerical solution is tested for convergence under computational mesh renement and is compared with the predictions approximation and asymptotic matching. of a recently developed nonlinear theory based on the Pade Good agreement has been found between numerical solutions and predictions of the nonlinear theory in both two and three dimensions and for both the reected shock and the reected rarefaction wave cases. The numerical study is extended to the re-shock experiment in which the uid interface interacts initially with the incident shock. Later, as the transmitted shock bounces back from the wall, the uid interface is re-shocked. 1997 American Institute of Physics. S1070-66319700910-0

I. INTRODUCTION

Recently the Richtmyer-Meshkov RM instability has attracted the attention of many researchers for its role in the controlled nuclear fusion with inertial connement ICF, electro-magnetic implosion and the evolution of an astrophysical object such as the formation of a supernova. The energy of the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability is excited by the interaction between a shock wave and a contact interface across which uids are different. Such instability was theoretically predicted by Richtmyer1 and later experimentally veried by Meshkov.2 Since then more experiments on Richtmyer-Meshkov instability have been conducted using shock tube,35 short period acceleration force6 and NOVA laser.7 Several numerical simulations on the nonlinear growth rate of the RM unstable interfaces have been performed.815 Several theories have been developed from different approaches. Based on the Laplace transformation, Fraley16 developed an approximate solution for the asymptotic growth rate of the compressible linear theory in the case of reected shock. Haan17 derived the second order solutions for incompressible systems with multi-modes. Samtaney and Zabusky18 studied the RM instability from the vortex dynamics method. In his path breaking work, Richtmyer derived the linear theory for the case of reected shock. Later the linear theory for the case of reected rarefaction wave was developed by Zhang and his co-workers.19 However, for a long period of time, theories have failed to give quantitatively correct predictions to the growth rate of the RM unstable mode for uids with a nite density ratio across the uid interface. Several nonlinear theories have been developed and several computations have been carried out, but all of them are for systems with innite density ratio across the uid interface.
a

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Fax: 317 2743460; phone: 317 274-9745; electronic mail: linli@math.iupui.edu

These nonlinear theories and computations are based on symbolic computations,20 Layzer-type approximation,21 and conformal mapping.22 Recently, a quantitative nonlinear theory was developed for the compressible RM instability in both two and three dimensions.2325 This theory provides analytic predictions for the growth rate and amplitude of the RM unstable mode for both the case of reected shock and the case of reected rarefaction wave. It has been shown23,24 that in two dimensions the theoretical predictions are in very good agreement with the experimental data and the numerical solutions using the front tracking method. Almost all the past numerical and theoretical studies have been for systems in two dimensions. However, in reality, the RM instability often occurs in three dimensions. Numerical simulations of the RM instability in three dimensions have been carried out previously by Cloutman and Wehner.9 Youngs also performed numerical studies of the RM turbulent mixing in three dimensions.15 In this paper, we present a careful numerical comparison of the RM instability in both two and three dimensions with the main focus on three dimensions. We consider both the case of reected shock and the case of reected rarefaction wave. The numerical method we use features a high resolution for both the shock front and the contact discontinuity.26 This numerical method is based on the Total Variation Diminishing scheme and uses articial compression TVD/AC to sharpen the contact discontinuity. It has been used previously in a study of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability.27 This method gives accurate solutions when the equation of states of the uids on different sides of the discontinuous interface are similar. In this paper, we will show that this method gives convergent solutions for the large scale interface structure and for the growth rate of the unstable interface under the computational mesh renement. The numerical solutions are compared with the predictions of the nonlinear theory by
1997 American Institute of Physics 3069

Phys. Fluids 9 (10), October 1997

1070-6631/97/9(10)/3069/9/$10.00

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Zhang and Sohn in the nonlinear regime in both two and three dimensions. We report two types of physical experiments. One is the experiment of a single shock transition through the uid interface. The other one is the re-shocked experiment. In the latter case, the uid interface is shocked twice, rst by the incident shock, and then by the reected shock as the transmitted shock bounces back from a reecting wall the bottom of the shock tube. Both the reected shock case and the reected rarefaction wave case are studied in this paper. In the reected rarefaction case, the perturbed interface reverses its phase after the passage of the shock through the uid interface. The phase inversion refers to the phenomenon that the ngers at the uid interface reverse their penetration direction after the passage of the shock. This occurs in the reected rarefaction case. This phenomenon has been predicted in both linear theory19 and nonlinear theory24 of the RM instability for the compressible uids. For the re-shock simulation, the uid interface experiences the interactions of both reected shock and reected rarefaction wave. We report an interesting observation from our numerical study. We show that in the re-shock simulation, there exists a gradual transition for the growth of the ngers at the re-shocked uid interfaces. This change depends primarily on the ratio of the wavelength of the perturbation mode to the initial distance from the uid interface to the reecting wall the bottom of the shock tube. It is only weakly affected by the shock strength and the Atwood number of the two uids.
II. NUMERICAL METHOD AND ANALYTICAL THEORY A. Numerical method and initial conditions

FIG. 1. Schematics of the initial congurations for two types of experiments on the RM instability which we simulate. Plot ( a ) is the initial conguration for simulations of the single transit shock system. Plot ( b ) is the initial conguration for simulations of the system which contains re-shock at late time.

The mathematical equations which we use to simulate the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability are the compressible Euler equations for two ideal gases,

v 0, t v P v v g, t E v E P v g, t

1 2 3

which represent the conservations of mass, momentum and energy, and the equation of state for the ideal gas P 1 E

v2 . 2

Here is the uid density, v is the velocity, v is the magnitude of v. E is the specic energy, P is pressure, and is the adiabatic exponent. These equations are solved by a nite difference method. In particular, our numerical method emphasizes the resolution on physical discontinuities, because in the RM instability, the driving energy transferred from the shock front to the uid body is sensitive to the accuracy of the solution of the interaction between the shock front and the contact surface.
3070 Phys. Fluids, Vol. 9, No. 10, October 1997

The numerical solution using this method features high resolution for both the shock front and the contact discontinuity. It is an efcient method which can be parallelized easily. For details of this numerical method, we refer to the paper by Li, Jin and Glimm.26 We mention that this method may generate an undesirable articial shock at the contact discontinuity when the equations of state for uids on different sides of the contact surface are very different. For this reason, we will limit the computation in this paper to materials with similar equations of states namely, the -law gas. A detailed discussion of this method and its comparison with the front tracking method can be found in Ref. 28. For the RM instability in plane geometry, the initial conguration of the system contains three regions: the region behind the incident shock, the region between the incident shock and the perturbed uid interface, and the region on the other side of the perturbed uid interface. The states ahead of the shock are initialized by the prescription of the densities below and above the contact surface, the pressure and the velocities of the two uids. The state behind shock is determined by a prescription of the pressure behind the shock front or the Mach number of the shock together with the state ahead of shock. We assume that, initially, the incident shock propagates downward. Therefore, a ow-through Dirichlet boundary condition is used at the top of the computational domain. Periodic boundary conditions are imposed at each vertical boundary side. For simulations of systems with a single shock transition, a ow-through Dirichlet boundary condition is applied at the bottom of the computational domain; while for systems with re-shock, a reecting Neumann boundary condition is applied at the bottom of the computational domain. The initial conditions for these two types of physical systems are shown in Fig. 1.
Xiaolin Li and Q. Zhang

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B. Analytical nonlinear theory

In this paper, we will compare the fully nonlinear numerical solutions with the predictions of a nonlinear theory for the compressible RM instability developed by Zhang and Sohn.23,24 The theory of Zhang and Sohn is based on a physical picture that the dominant effect of the compressibility occurs near the shock front. Compressibility inuences the uid interface at the bifurcation and linear stages. At an early time, the transmitted shock and reect wave are in the vicinity of the uid interface and the magnitude of the disturbance is small. As time evolves, the magnitude of the disturbance at the uid interface increases signicantly while the transmitted shock and the reected wave move away from the interface. Therefore at intermediate and late times, the effect of compressibility is reduced and the nonlinearity starts to dominate the inter-facial dynamics. In other words, at early times the system is governed by the linearized Euler equations for compressible uids, while, at later times, the nonlinear equations for incompressible uids are sufcient to describe the system. For solution of a linear, compressible system, the reader is referred to the works of Richtmyer1 and Yang et al.19 Approximate solutions for nonlinear, incompressible systems are constructed by Zhang and Sohn2325 based on the method approximation. Finally, Zhang and Sohn applied of the Pade the asymptotic matching method which joins the solution for the linear, compressible system and the solution for nonlinear, incompressible system to obtain an analytical expression for the growth rate of a compressible RM unstable mode. This expression changes smoothly from the linear regime to the intermediate nonlinear regime. The matched solution for the overall growth rate, v , of the RM unstable mode is2325
v v lin
2 2 2 2 2 1 a 0 k v lin 1 t max 0,a 2 0 k 1 2 k v lint 2

The expressions of 1 and 2 for general values of k x and k y can be found in Ref. 25. Equation 5 is the growth rate of the compressible RM unstable interface driven by shock waves from the linear regime to the intermediate nonlinear regime. Since the range of validity of a nite order approximant is limited, this formula is not valid in the Pade late stage of the RM instability.
III. NUMERICAL RESULTS A. Validation study in two dimensions

, 5

where v lin is the solution of the linear theory, which can be found from Ref. 1 for the case of reected shock, or from Ref. 19 for cases of reected shock and reected rarefaction wave, a 0 is the post-shock perturbation amplitude at the uid interface, and k is the wave number. 1 for a system with no phase inversion and 1 for a system with phase in1 for uids in two dimenversion. Here 1 1 and 2 A 2 2 sions with k k 2 d , and 1 1 2 5 2 4 5 10 A 2 8 1 4 7 2 6 5 10 , 8 2 1 7 7 2 9 5 3 10 A 2 16 1 4 7 2 6 5 10 , 16

for uids in three dimensions with k x k y .

Phys. Fluids, Vol. 9, No. 10, October 1997

In this section, we report the convergence test of the numerical solution. This test is carried out in two dimensions, since the mathematical equations and the computational method in two dimensions are very similar to those in three dimensions. The convergence test of the numerical solutions are performed under the mesh renement of the computational grid. The growth rate of the unstable mode is dened as the rate of change of the amplitude. The physical quantities which we present in this paper are in terms of dimensionless length kx , dimensionless velocity v / v i and dimensionless time k v i t . Here k is the wave number and v i is the initial velocity behind the incident shock. Figure 2a shows the convergence test of the 2-D growth rate of the RM unstable mode from the computations with a sequence of 20 80, 40 160, 60 240 and 80 320 computational grids. The physical parameters for the computation shown in Fig. 2 are: 1 / 2 1/5, 1 2 1.4. A shock with Mach number 1.5 propagates from the light uid of density 1 towards the heavy uid of density 2 . In this case the reected wave is a shock. The dimensionless perturbation amplitude at the initial interface is 0.396. In comparison with the growth rate in the solution of the nest grid (80 320), the average relative error of growth rate is about 11% in the solution using a 20 80 grid. Such relative error is reduced to 3% in the solution using a 40 160 grid, and to 1% in the solution using a 60 240 grid. A similar convergence test on the 3-D growth rate of the RM unstable mode is shown by Fig. 2b. The sequence of the computational grids is 20 20 60, 40 40 120, 60 60 180 and 80 80 240. In this case, the amplitudes of the perturbation modes in x and y directions are both 0.238. In Fig. 3, we compare the 2-D numerical solutions with the predictions of the nonlinear theory developed by Zhang and Sohn. Figure 3 shows good agreement between the numerical solutions and the predictions of the nonlinear theory. Figure 3a is for the case of reected shock, and Fig. 3b is for the case of reected rarefaction wave. The dimensionless pre-shock amplitudes in both cases are ka 0.476 and the computational grid is 80 320. Other physical parameters are the same as in Fig. 2a. For comparison, the predictions of the linear theory and the impulsive model are also shown in Fig. 3. From this comparison we see that both the linear theory and the impulsive model give quantitatively incorrect predictions of the growth rate. There is a marked difference between the peak growth rate of the linear theory and that of the computation the average difference is about 20%. This suggests that with the given initial amplitude, the nonlinear effect starts at a very early stage of the instability. Such
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FIG. 2. Plot ( a ) is the convergence test of the 2-D growth rates of the RM unstable mode from the computation with a sequence of mesh renement: 20 80, 40 160, 60 240 and 80 320. Plot ( b ) is the convergence test of the 3-D growth rates from the computation with a sequence of mesh renement: 20 20 60, 40 40 120, 60 60 180, and 80 80 240.

difference narrows as the initial amplitude decreases. The difference is about 12% for a simulation with ka 0.238 and 2% with ka 0.125.
B. 3-D transit shock experiments

FIG. 3. Comparison of the 2-D growth rate from the numerical solution with the prediction of the nonlinear theory by Zhang and Sohn, the predictions of the linear theory and the prediction of the impulsive model. Plot ( a ) shows the growth rate in the case of reected shock. Plot ( b ) shows the growth rate in the case of reected rarefaction wave.

We conducted the numerical simulations for a system in three dimensions with a single transit shock. The numerical solutions are compared with the predictions of the nonlinear theory of Zhang and Sohn. Good agreement is achieved between the numerical solutions and the theoretical predictions for both the reected shock case and the reected rarefaction wave case. The linear theory predicts that, at early times, the
3072 Phys. Fluids, Vol. 9, No. 10, October 1997

growth rate reaches a constant with some decaying oscillation around the constant. The growth rate remains constant at late times. Our numerical solution in three dimensions shows that the linear theory for the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability is only valid for a very short period of time. It has been shown theoretically25 that, in the linear regime, the growth rates for the RM instabilities in two dimensions and three dimensions are identical as long as the initial amplitudes and the total wave numbers are the same. Our numerical simulations veried this property. Figure 4 shows the
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FIG. 4. Comparison of 3-D growth rate from the numerical solution with the prediction of the nonlinear theory by Zhang and Sohn, the predictions of the linear theory and the prediction of the impulsive model. Plot ( a ) shows the growth rate in the case of reected shock. Plot ( b ) shows the growth rate in the case of reected rarefaction wave. FIG. 5. Comparison of the 3-D amplitude from the numerical solution with the predictions of the linear theory, the impulsive model and the nonlinear theory by Zhang and Sohn. The physical parameters are the same as in Figs. 3a and 4a. These are for the cases of reected shock. a is for the two dimensional case and b is for the three dimensional case.

growth rates of the numerical simulations in three dimensions for both the case of reected shock and the case of reected rarefaction wave. The physical parameters for the cases in Fig. 4 are the same as those in the numerical simulations shown in Fig. 3 for the two dimensional system, except that in the three dimensional case, there are two perturbation modes perpendicular to each other. Figure 4 is for a three dimensional symmetric system namely, k x k y and the amplitudes k x a x k y a y 0.238. It has been shown theoretically25 that for the same wave numbers, the symmetric system in three dimensions has a larger growth rate than that in two dimensions. But the qualitative behavior of the growth rates in these two systems is the same. By comparing
Phys. Fluids, Vol. 9, No. 10, October 1997

the results in Fig. 4 with the results in Fig. 3, our simulations have conrmed such prediction. As in Fig. 3, Fig. 4a is for the case of reected shock and Fig. 4b is for the case of reected rarefaction wave. The comparison between the growth of the ngers at the uid interface in two and three dimensions is presented in terms of amplitude of the ngers in Figs. 5a and 5b. Figures 5a and 5b both start from the post shock amplitude. Our comparison is in the linear and
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the three dimensional simulation for the case of reected rarefaction wave. The physical parameters for the system shown in Fig. 7 are: 1 / 2 5, 1 2 1.4. A shock of Mach number 1.5 propagates from the heavy uid to the light uid. The dimensionless pre-shock amplitude of the perturbation at the initial interface is k x a x k y a y 0.238. The gure shows the RM unstable interface at dimensionless times 0,43.6 and 130.8 for the three dimensional case of reected rarefaction wave. Both the linear theory19 and the nonlinear theory24 have predicted that, in the case of a shock traveling from heavy uid to light uid, the unstable mode at the uid interface experiences a phase inversion. This phase inversion is clearly shown in Fig. 7 from t 0 to t 43.6).
FIG. 6. The reconstructed uid interface at dimensionless times t 19.5, 97.7, and 293.1, respectively. Vortex rolling of the interface is observed at very late time ( t 293.1). This is the case of reected shock.

C. Re-shock experiments

the intermediate nonlinear stages of the RM instability and the difference between 2-D and 3-D growth is relatively small. The predictions of the linear theory, the impulsive model and the nonlinear theory of Zhang and Sohn are also shown in Figs. 3, 4 and 5. The amplitude in the nonlinear theory of Zhang and Sohn is calculated by integrating the growth rate given by Eq. 5 over time. Figures 3, 4 and 5 show good agreement between the numerical solutions and the predictions of the nonlinear theory by Zhang and Sohn. We use the level function to follow the evolving uid interface. In the level set method,29 the uid interface is traced by the zeroes of the level surface of the level function, and the geometrical shape of the contact interface is reconstructed through the level function. Figure 6 shows the evolution of the RM interface at dimensionless times 19.5, 97.7 and 293.1 for the three dimensional reected shock case shown in Figs. 4a and 5a. At t 293.1, the interface has a vortex roll-up around the spike side the nger of the heavy uid penetrating into the light uid. In Fig. 7, we show the evolution of a uid interface in

In this section, we perform the numerical simulation for the re-shock experiment. In the re-shock system, the uid interface is shocked twice: rst due to the initial incident shock and second due the transmitted shock bouncing back from the reecting wall at the bottom of the shock tube. If the uid interface is unperturbed, the system degenerates into a one dimensional Riemann problem. The character of the solution to the Riemann problem of the re-shock system is the following: after the transition of the incident shock through the interface, the interface gains a velocity and moves toward the bottom wall; later, the transmitted shock bounces back from the reecting wall; this reected wave interacts with the contact surface again and pushes the interface backward. Different density ratio and shock strength will affect the speed of such characteristic motion quantitatively, but not qualitatively. When the uid interface is perturbed, a Richtmyer-Meshkov instability is induced after the passage of the incident shock and ngers grow at the uid interface. Before the arrival of the second shock, the growth rate of ngers at the uid interface is the same as the single transit shock system which has been discussed in the previous subsection. The time it takes for the shock to bounce back from the wall and to arrive at the uid interface de-

FIG. 7. The reconstructed uid interface at dimensionless times t 0, 43.6 and 130.8, respectively. In this case, the shock travels from heavy uid to light uid, and the reected wave is a rarefaction. A phase inversion occurs after the shock transition. This is shown by the change of the interface from t 0 to t 43.6. 3074 Phys. Fluids, Vol. 9, No. 10, October 1997 Xiaolin Li and Q. Zhang

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FIG. 8. Maximum ( z max) and minimum ( z min) heights in the RichtmyerMeshkov re-shock experiment. In this case, the amplitude of the perturbed interface remains almost constant after the interaction with the reected shock. This results in a stable uid interface. z 0 is the interface position when no perturbation is imposed. The initial density ratio 1 / 2 1/5, 1 2 1.4, the shock Mach number is 1.5 and the pre-shock perturbation amplitudes are k x a x k y a y 0.196. The dimensionless initial distance between the mean interface position and the reecting wall is 1.4 .

FIG. 9. Maximum height and minimum height in the Richtmyer-Meshkov re-shock experiment. The interface motion resembles the simulation with single shock transition before t 22. The shocked uid interface is pushed toward the reecting wall and its amplitude grows. After about t 22, the interface is hit by the reected shock from the bottom wall. The following motion is very dynamic. The interface becomes very unstable, and the amplitude ( z maxzmin) increases to 15 times of the initial amplitude at t 58.6. The dimensionless initial distance between the mean interface position and the reecting wall is 5.17 .

pends on the distance between the initial interface and the reecting wall. When the distance is short, this time period is also short, and the interface will quickly experience the reshock. The time of re-shock can be estimated by the following formula: tL

1
v ts

1 v bs , v bs v c v bs

where L is distance from the mean position of the initial interface to the wall, v c is the velocity of the uid interface and v ts and v bs are the speed of the transmitted shock and its speed after bouncing back from the wall, respectively. v c , v ts and v bs can be determined from the solution of the Riemann problem. Here we have neglected the growth of perturbation amplitude over the time t . When the incident shock travels from light uid to heavy one, there is no phase inversion, while the phase inversion does occur after the passage of the second shock or re-shock. This is because at the time of re-shock, the direction of shock propagation is reversed, that is, from heavy uid to light uid. The re-shock phenomenon is very important in the problem of controlled nuclear fusion with inertial connement ICF. We simulated the interface motion after the rst shock and the re-shock, and observed that the uid mixing can be dramatically different with different physical parameters. We demonstrate this phenomenon by simulating two systems with different L . The initial condition of these simulations is shown in Fig. 1b.
Phys. Fluids, Vol. 9, No. 10, October 1997

FIG. 10. Evolution of uid interface in the Richtmyer-Meshkov re-shock experiment. The uid interface rst moves downward after transition of the incident shock. It is then hit by the reected shock. Since the reected shock travels from heavy uid to light uid, it is the reected rarefaction case which reverses the phase of the interface motion. A mushroom-like spike is formed at t 58.6. Xiaolin Li and Q. Zhang 3075

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In the rst re-shock simulation, the horizontal side has the dimensionless length L 2 . The average distance from the initial uid interface to the reecting wall the bottom of the computational domain is L 1.4 . The Mach number of the incident shock is 1.5, and the pre-shocked density ratio between two uids across the uid interface is 1 / 2 1/5. The dimensionless perturbation amplitudes in two horizontal directions are k x a x k y a y 0.196. The incident shock travels from the light uid to the heavy uid. We choose t 0 as the time at which the incident shock collides with the uid interface. In the case of unperturbed interface, the reshock occurs at the dimensionless time t 5.9. For the perturbed interface, the re-shock hits the bottom of the interface at about t 5.4. Our numerical simulation Fig. 8 indicates that the system has very little mixing after the re-shock. In Fig. 8, z 0 is the interface position with no perturbation, while z max and z min are the maximum and minimum positions of the perturbed interface, respectively. We can see from this gure that the amplitude remains almost constant after the re-shock. This numerical solution is obtained by using a 40 40 160 computational grid. In the second re-shock simulation, the density ratio, Mach number and the perturbation amplitude at the uid interface are all the same as the ones used in the rst reshock simulation. But in this case, we placed the initial uid interface further away from the wall at L 5.17 . The reshock occurs at about t 22 the lower tips of the nger begins to turn around at about t 19.5). The re-shock times in both simulations are in good agreement with Eq. 6. After the re-shock, the instability develops much more rapidly than the rst re-shock simulations. At the time t 58.6, the amplitude of the unstable mode at the uid interface has grown to about 15 times than in the initial perturbation. The maximum and minimum heights of the uid interface are shown in Fig. 9. A mushroom is formed t 58.6 see Fig. 10. From these two different re-shock simulations, we nd that for a given set of density ratio and Mach number, there is a gradual transition from a stable system to an unstable system. This transition depends on the dimensionless distance from the unshocked mean uid interface to the reecting wall. A system with larger L is more unstable than the one with smaller L . Other simulations suggest that the Atwood number and shock strength only weakly affect the transition from a stable case to an unstable case. This freeze out phenomenon was noted by Mikaelian in his early papers.30,31 He pointed out the importance of such stabilizing effect in the inertial-connement-fusion ICF. Mikaelians analysis was based on the linear cancelation of incident and reected shocks.
IV. CONCLUSIONS

sions and for both the reected shock and the reected rarefaction wave cases, with the predictions of a recently developed nonlinear theory of the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability. The numerical comparison shows that this nonlinear theory provides a quantitatively correct growth rate for the RM unstable interface from the linear regime to the intermediate nonlinear regime. The results of the numerical simulations show that, after re-shock, the growth of the ngers at the uid interface depends on the dimensionless distance between the mean position of the initial interface and the reecting wall. As this distance decreases, the system changes gradually from an unstable one to a stable one. This freezeout phenomenon was also pointed out by Mikaelian. Such effect is important in the inertial connement fusion. We suggest a more detailed and systematic investigation into this problem.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank Dr. J. Glimm and Dr. D. H. Sharp for helpful discussions. The work of X. L. Li is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy Grant No. DE-FG02-90ER25084. The work of Q. Zhang is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Contract No. DE-FG02-90ER25084, by subcontract from Oak Ridge National Laboratory subcontract No. 38XSK964C and by National Science Foundation, Contract No. NSF-DMS9500568.
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In this paper, we have presented a numerical study of the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability in two and three dimensions using a high resolution numerical method with robust handling of interface reconstruction. We show that for uids with the same adiabatic exponents, this method gives convergent numerical solutions for the growth rate under computational mesh renement. The numerical solutions are in good agreement, in both two dimensions and three dimen3076 Phys. Fluids, Vol. 9, No. 10, October 1997

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G. Fraley, Rayleigh-Taylor stability for a normal shock wave-density discontinuity interaction, Phys. Fluids 29, 376 1986. 17 S. W. Haan, Weakly nonlinear hydrodynamic instabilities in inertial fusion, Phys. Fluids B 3, 2349 1991. 18 R. Samtaney and N. J. Zabusky, Circulation deposition on shockaccelerated planar and curved density-stratied interfaces: Models and scaling laws, J. Fluid Mech. 269, 45 1994. 19 Y. Yang, Q. Zhang, and D. H. Sharp, Small amplitude theory of Richtmyer-Meshkov instability, Phys. Fluids A 6, 1856 1994. 20 A. L. Velikovich and G. Dimonte, Nonlinear perturbation theory of the incompressible Richtmyer-Meshkov instability, Phys. Rev. Lett. 22, 3112 1996. 21 J. Hecht, U. Alon, and D. Shvarts, Potential ow models of RayleighTaylor and Richtmyer-Meshkov bubble fronts, Phys. Fluids 6, 4019 1994. 22 R. Menikoff and C. Zemach, Rayleigh-Taylor instability and the use of conformal maps for ideal uid ow, J. Comput. Phys. 51, 28 1983. 23 Q. Zhang and S.-I. Sohn, An analytical nonlinear theory of RichtmyerMeshkov instability, Phys. Rev. A 212, 149 1996.

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approximation for an interfacial uid Q. Zhang and S.-I. Sohn, Pade mixing problem, Appl. Math. Lett. in press. 25 Q. Zhang and S.-I. Sohn Quantitative theory of Richtmyer-Meshkov instability in three dimensions, submitted. 26 X. L. Li, B. X. Jin, and J. Glimm, Numerical study for the three dimensional Rayleigh-Taylor instability through the TVD/AC scheme and parallel computation, J. Comput. Phys. 126, 343 1996. 27 X. L. Li, A numerical study of 3-D bubble merger in the RayleighTaylor instability, Phys. Fluids 8, 322 1996. 28 J. Glimm, J. Grove, X. L. Li, K. Shyue, Q. Zhang, and Y. Zeng, Three dimensional front tracking, SIAM J. Sci. Comput. in press. 29 S. Osher and J. Sethian, Front propagation with curvature-dependent speed: Algorithm based on Hamilton-Jacobi formulations, J. Comput. Phys. 79, 12, 1 1988. 30 K. O. Mikaelian, Richtmyer-Meshkov instabilities in stratied uids, Phys. Rev. A 31, 410 1985. 31 K. O. Mikaelian, Rayleigh-Taylor instability and Richtmyer-Meshkov instabilities and mixing in stratied spherical shells, Phys. Rev. A 42, 3400 1990.

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