An Experimental Investigation of Two-Dimensional Rayleigh-Taylor Mixing Flow

A mixing flow caused by Rayleigh-Taylor instability is observed in the case of that a heavy fluid is placed on a light fluid in gravitational field. Disturbances with small scale in the contact surface between both fluids develop into a large scale mixing flow quickly. In this paper, a mixing flow generated by Rayleigh-Taylor instability in a two-dimensional cavity has been investigated experimentally and numerically. In order to discuss the relation between the depth ofbubble and spike and the density ratio, and to investigate the flow structure developing from small-scale disturbance to large-scale mixing, the results obtained by numerical analysis are compared with the experimental results and with theoretical results obtained by Taylor's equation which gives the width of mixing region.