Growth mechanism of interfacial fluid-mixing width induced by successive nonlinear wave interactions

Interfacial fluid mixing induced by successive waves, such as shock, rarefaction, and compression waves, plays a fundamental role in engineering applications, e.g., inertial confinement fusion, and in natural phenomena, e.g., supernova explosion. These waves bring nonuniform, unsteady external forces into the mixing zone, which leads to a complex mixing process. The growth rate of the mixing width is analyzed by decomposing the turbulent flow field into the averaged field and the fluctuating counterpart. The growth rate is thus divided into three parts: (i) the stretching or compression (S(C)) effect induced by the averaged-velocity difference between two ends of the mixing zone, (ii) the penetration effect induced by the fluctuations which represent the penetration of the two species into each other, and (iii) the diffusive effect, which is induced by the molecular diffusion and is negligible in high-Reynolds-number flows at Schmidt number of order unity. The penetration effect is further divided into the Richtmyer-Meshkov (RM) effect, which is induced by fluctuations that were deposited by earlier wave interactions, and the Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) effect, which is caused by the fluctuations that arise in an overall acceleration of the mixing zone. During the passage of the rarefaction waves, the mixing zone is stretched, while during the passage of the compression waves or shock waves, the mixing zone is compressed. To illustrate these effects, a physical model of RM mixing with reshock is used. By combining the S(C), RM, and RT effects, the entire evolution of mixing width is restructured, which agrees well with numerical simulations for problems with a wide range of density ratios.