Properties of the Turbulent Mixing Layer in a Spherical Implosion

Abstract

We describe the behavior of a multimode interface that degenerates into a turbulent mixing layer when subjected to a spherical implosion. Results are presented from three-dimensional (3D) numerical simulations performed using the astrophysical flash code, while the underlying problem description is adopted from Youngs and Williams (YW). During the implosion, perturbations at the interface are subjected to growth due to the Richtmyer–Meshkov (RM) instability, the Rayleigh–Taylor (RT) instability, as well as the Bell–Plesset (BP) effects. We report on several quantities of interest to the turbulence modeling community, including the turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), components of the anisotropy tensor, density self-correlation, and atomic mixing, among others.