On the Mutual Penetrations of Two Fluids Whose Interface is Accelerated by a Shock Wave

A shock tube experimental investigation and numerical simulations are undertaken to study the evolution of a perturbed interface of two different gases accelerated by a shock wave. The experimental method is based on a high-speed camera laser sheet diagnostic technique, and simulations are provided by our code CARBUR based on a finite volume discretization of Navier–Stokes’s equations. Two gas pairs are used to illustrate both the heavy/light (air/He) and the light/ heavy (air/SF₆) cases. Two simultaneous large initial perturbations, one positive and one negative, are tested for an incident shock wave Mach number in air of about 1.3. The thin membrane (less than 1 μ) which materializes the initial interface between the two test gases presents 2D perturbations whose wave number is close to 1 in order to rapidly reach the non-linear regime. The development of the perturbations is captured at a frequency of 10 kHz after the interface acceleration, and the experiments are complemented with a numerical simulation to validate the interface deformations. Results show an asymmetric mutual gas penetration increasing with the absolute value of the Atwood’s number. Furthermore, they confirm that the heavier gas penetrates the lighter as thin spikes and the lighter gas penetrates the heavier as large bubbles. Moreover, we show that the spike moves faster than the bubble in the heavy/light case and slightly faster in the light/heavy one. Finally, numerical and experimental results are in agreement.