A Multi-Fluid Investigation of the Membrane Supporting Grid Effects on the Richtmyer-Meshkov Instability

We present results of numerical experiments performed to evaluate the effects of the material interface supporting wire grid on the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability (RMI). An air-SF6 interface initially perturbed sinusoidally supported on a number of solid circular cylinders. These cylinders are introduced along the interface to mimic the presence of the grid thin wires. The resulted mixing and growth rate of the perturbation in the presence and absence of the supporting grid were analyzed and validated with experimental measurements. The small scales perturbation imposed by the cylinders are around two orders of magnitude smaller than the interface sinusoidal perturbation wavelength requiring the adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) to adequately resolve small scale features. Furthermore, an embedded boundary technique is used to handle the complex geometry stemming from the presence of these multiple. A multi-fluid formulation is utilized to form a multi-gas species interface and compute the gas mixture properties.