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Office of Scientific and Technical Information
 

Effects of Initial Conditions on Compressible Mixing in Supernova-Relevant Laboratory Experiments

Conference ·
; ;
In core-collapse supernovae, strong blast waves drive interfaces susceptible to Rayleigh-Taylor (RT), Richtmyer-Meshkov (RM), and Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) instabilities. In addition, perturbation growth can result from material expansion in large-scale velocity gradients behind the shock front. Laser-driven experiments are designed to produce a strongly shocked interface whose evolution is a scaled version of the unstable hydrogen-helium interface in core-collapse supernovae such as SN 1987A. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop an understanding of the effect of hydrodynamic instabilities and the resulting transition to turbulence on supernovae observables that remain as yet unexplained. In this paper, we summarize recent results from our computational study of unstable systems driven by high Mach number shock and blast waves. For planar multimode systems, compressibility effects preclude the emergence of a regime of self-similar instability growth independent of the initial conditions (IC's) by allowing for memory of the initial conditions to be retained in the mix-width at all times. With higher-dimensional blast waves, divergence restores the properties necessary for establishment of the self-similar state, but achieving it requires very high initial characteristic mode number and high Mach number for the incident blast wave. Initial conditions predicted by some recent stellar calculations are incompatible with self-similarity.
Research Organization:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
DOE Contract Number:
W-7405-ENG-48
OSTI ID:
15014230
Report Number(s):
UCRL-PROC-203919
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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Related Subjects

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY
ASTROPHYSICS
COMPRESSIBILITY
ENERGY DENSITY
HYDRODYNAMICS
INSTABILITY
MACH NUMBER
SUPERNOVAE
TURBULENCE
VELOCITY