Direct Numerical Simulations of Rayleigh-Taylor instability

The development of the Rayleigh-Taylor mixing layer is studied using data from an extensive new set of Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS), performed on the 0.5 Petaflops, 150k compute cores BG/L Dawn supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This includes a suite of simulations with grid size of 1024(2) x 4608 and Atwood number ranging from 0.04 to 0.9, in order to examine small departures from the Boussinesq approximation as well as large Atwood number effects, and a high resolution simulation of grid size 4096(2) x 4032 and Atwood number of 0.75. After the layer width had developed substantially, additional branched simulations have been run under reversed and zero gravity conditions. While the bulk of the results will be published elsewhere, here we present preliminary results on: 1) the long-standing open question regarding the discrepancy between the numerically and experimentally measured mixing layer growth rates and 2) mixing characteristics.