Numerical Study of the Effect of Surface Tension on Interface Instability

Abstract

A new technique for including the effect of surface tension in time‐dependent, incompressible flow calculations is used to examine the linear and nonlinear phases of Rayleigh‐Taylor instability. The variation of the linear growth rate with the surface tension coefficient and (for a fixed coefficient) with the wavenumber of the perturbation is shown to be in good agreement with Chandrasekhar's analytic prediction. In the nonlinear regime, it is shown how surface tension affects the growth of the Rayleigh‐Taylor spike and provides the mechanism for drop separation from the spike.