Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2019 Sep 10;116(37):18218-18226.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1714500115. Epub 2018 Aug 6.

Interface dynamics: Mechanisms of stabilization and destabilization and structure of flow fields

Affiliations

Interface dynamics: Mechanisms of stabilization and destabilization and structure of flow fields

Snezhana I Abarzhi et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

Interfacial mixing and transport are nonequilibrium processes coupling kinetic to macroscopic scales. They occur in fluids, plasmas, and materials over celestial events to atoms. Grasping their fundamentals can advance a broad range of disciplines in science, mathematics, and engineering. This paper focuses on the long-standing classic problem of stability of a phase boundary-a fluid interface that has a mass flow across it. We briefly review the recent advances in theoretical and experimental studies, develop the general theoretical framework directly linking the microscopic interfacial transport to the macroscopic flow fields, discover mechanisms of interface stabilization and destabilization that have not been discussed before for both inertial and accelerated dynamics, and chart perspectives for future research.

Keywords: Landau–Darrieus instability; Rayleigh–Taylor instability; interface dynamics; interfacial mixing; phase boundary.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Dependence of eigenvalues on density ratio. (A) Conservative dynamics. (B) Classic Landau dynamics.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Flow fields’ structure for the inertial conservative dynamics. Plots of real parts of the interface perturbation, the perturbed velocity vector fields, and the perturbed velocity streamlines and the contour plot of the perturbed pressure with red (blue) for positive (negative) values.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Flow fields’ structure for the classic Landau dynamics. Plots of real parts of the interface perturbation, the perturbed velocity vector fields, and the perturbed velocity streamlines and the contour plot of the perturbed pressure with red (blue) for positive (negative) values.
Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.
Dependence of eigenvalues on density ratio at some gravity value. (A) Accelerated conservative dynamics. (B) Accelerated Landau dynamics.
Fig. 5.
Fig. 5.
Flow fields’ structure for the accelerated conservative dynamics. Plots of real parts of the interface perturbation, the perturbed velocity vector fields, and the perturbed velocity streamlines and the contour plot of perturbed pressure with red (blue) for positive (negative) values.
Fig. 6.
Fig. 6.
Flow fields’ structure for the accelerated Landau dynamics. Plots of real parts of the interface perturbation, the perturbed velocity vector fields, and the perturbed velocity streamlines and the contour plot of perturbed pressure with red (blue) for positive (negative) values.
Fig. 7.
Fig. 7.
Dependence of the growth rates of the instabilities on gravity value.

References

    1. Abarzhi SI, Gauthier S, Sreenivasan KR. Turbulent mixing and beyond: Non-equilibrium processes from atomistic to astrophysical scales. Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci. 2013;371:20130268. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Abarzhi SI. Review of theoretical modelling approaches of Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities and turbulent mixing. Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci. 2010;368:1809–1828. - PubMed
    1. Anisimov SI, Drake RP, Gauthier S, Meshkov EE, Abarzhi SI. What is certain and what is not so certain in our knowledge of Rayleigh-Taylor mixing? Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci. 2013;371:20130266. - PubMed
    1. Mayo SL, Olafson BD, Goddard WA. DREIDING: A generic force field for molecular simulations. J Phys Chem. 1990;9:8897–8909.
    1. Landau LD, Lifshitz EM. Course of Theoretical Physics I–IX. Pergamon; New York: 1987.

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources