Atomistic Dynamics of the Richtmyer-Meshkov Instability in Cylindrical and Planar Geometries

Abstract

We apply molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to study the evolution of the shock-driven Richtmyer-Meshkov instability (RMI) in the cylindrical and planar geometries. Compared to traditional hydrodynamic simulations, MD has a number of fundamental advantages: it accounts for strong gradients of the pressure and temperature, and captures accurately the heat and mass transfers at the early stage (shock passage) as well as the late stage (perturbation growth) of the instability evolution. MD has no hydrodynamic limitations for spatial resolution and thermodynamic quasi-equilibrium at atomic scale. We study the instability evolution for different perturbation modes and analyze the role of the vorticity production for RMI dynamics.