A Vertical Shock Tube for Experimental Studies on Interfacial Instability

A new vertical shock tube was developed in order to investigate different stages of the development of hydrodynamic interfacial instability. The versatile shock tube permits the execution of three kinds of experiments on the turbulent mixing of fluids induced by the (1) Richtmyer-Meshkov instability at the gas-gas interface (initial perturbations are imposed on a thin nitrocellulose membrane), (2) Rayleigh-Taylor instability at the gas-liquid interface (acceleration of the contact boundary of different density fluids g12104 m/s2), and (3) combined Rayleigh-Taylor and Richtmyer-Meshkov instability at the gas-liquid interface (the first shock wave Mach number ranges from 1.05 to 2.5). The main benefits of such a facility are that it allows, first, to perform multiple experiments of interfacial instability and, second, to measure different transition phases from the beginning to the fully developed turbulent mixing stages.