Using the SMG scheme to study the Rayleigh-Taylor instability growth in solids

Rayleigh-Taylor instability RTI occurs while a less dense fluid is accelerating a denser one Rayleigh (1883); Taylor (1950)[1,2]. Under gravity the material strength damps and prevents RTI formation in solids. However, at higher accelerations RTI will prevail. The Staggered Mesh Godunov (SMG) scheme for Lagrangian Luttwak and Falcovitz (2006)[3] and ALE Luttwak and Falcovitz (2005)[4] hydrodynamics is applied to study the effect of yield strength on the RTI growth. A test problem is set up which extends for solids a well-known test for RTI growth in fluids Loubere et al. (2010)[5]. The SMG scheme employs frameinvariant slope limiters. The convex hull based VIP limiter Luttwak and Falcovitz (2011); Luttwak and Falcovitz (2010)[6,7] is used for vectors and oriented Bounding Box based limiter Luttwak (2015)[8] for the stress tensor. This way, we prevent numerical effects of symmetry breaking to interfere, while following the RTI growth. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.