The purpose of this project is to explore and in part resolve
the issue of mixing growth rates for the Rayleigh-Taylor fluid mixing
instability.
This mixing problem has achieved a certain level of attention
due to its intrinsic importance to the ICF and SBSS problems
and due to the fact that most codes fail to agree with the
experiments, generally by a factor of about 2.
The Front Tracking code FronTier, and a code from the Shvarts
group have results consistent with the range of reported experiments.
In this project we will continue computational studies of this
problem based on FronTier, exploring such issues as mesh refinement
and sensitivity to variation of initial conditions.
The purpose of the study is verification: to show that the agreement
of the code with experiment is not fortuitous.
It is also to determine that statistical quantities (other than the
mixing rate) are computed correctly.
The goal of such computations, once verified (they are already validated),
is to gather mixing statistics and use them in a test of subgrid
models of fluid mixing. Thus the verification stage of this study will
blend smoothly into its primary scientific purpose of scientific
examination of the statistical description of fluid mixing.
