Simulation of the instability of an accelerating gaseous envelope

The development of perturbations of the parameters of a dense gaseous envelope traveling with an acceleration driven by a difference in the pressures on either side is investigated numerically. Plane and axisymmetric time-dependent flows of a compressible medium are considered. The effect of both the density of the envelope and the form of the initial perturbations of its shape and motion on the mass cumulation in the compactions formed is studied. The evolutions of the perturbations of a layer and the surface of a contact discontinuity accelerated by an impinging plane shock wave are compared.