Rayleigh-Taylor Instability

The method: MUSCL primitive fields with Roe flux function. AMR calculation in parameter space applicable to laboratory astrophysics.

Initial setup is in hydrostatic equilibrium with ρtop / ρbottom = 20, ρbottom = 175⋅10-4 g cm-3. The pressure at the top of the domain describing the hydrostatic equilibrium is 106 dyne μm-2. The effective acceleration due to gravity is 100 μm ns-2.

The interface has a hyperbolic tangent profile transitioning between the two fluids with a finite thickness of 0.5 μm. It is perturbed via a sinusoidal velocity perturbation with characteristic velocity 0.5 μm ns-1.

The left and right boundaries are periodic, and the bottom boundary is reflecting. The top boundary is extrapolating.

AMR calculation has modified refinement criteria to resolve entire region around instability, to avoid instability seeding. 3 levels of AMR (4 levels total) with base resolution of 32x128, yielding maximum effective resolution of 256x1024.

Movie of density.