Cylindrical convergence effects on the Rayleigh-Taylor instability in elastic and viscous media

Abstract

Convergence effects on the perturbation growth of an imploding surface separating two nonideal material media (elastic and viscous media) are analyzed in the case of a cylindrical implosion in both the Rayleigh-Taylor stable and unstable configurations. In the stable configuration, the perturbation damping effect due to angular momentum conservation becomes destroyed for sufficiently high values of the elastic modulus or of the viscosity of the media. For the unstable configuration, Rayleigh-Taylor instability can be suppressed by the elasticity or mitigated by the viscosity, but without practically affecting the perturbation growth due to the geometrical convergence. However, the convergence effects manifest themselves in a manner somewhat different from the classical Bell-Plesset effect by making the process more sensitive to the media compressibility than in the case involving ideal media.