Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	EP/C515153/1
Title:	Computational and Theoretical Modelling of Shock-Induced Instability and Mixing across Material Interfaces
Principal Investigator:	Drikakis, Professor D
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:	AWE
Department:	Sch of Engineering
Organisation:	Cranfield University
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	03 October 2005	Ends:	02 January 2009	Value (£):	242,609
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Aerodynamics Fluid Dynamics
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Aerospace, Defence and Marine Manufacturing
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
When a shock-wave refracts through the interface between two materials the boundary experiences the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability (RMI). RMI leads to the growth of perturbations on the interface and causes mixing of materials. Investigation of RMI helps us to understand the fundamental mechanisms associated with turbulence generation and mixing under shock conditions. The study of RMI is motivated by a broad area of applications in science and engineering, including inertial confinement fusion (ICF), nuclear devices, detonation, supersonic combustion, instability of collapsing gas bubbles, as well as applications in astrophysics (mixing of fluid in a supernova). For many of these applications the Reynolds number is very high and RMI rapidly leads to turbulent mixing. Further, the interaction of shock waves with materials is also of interest in medical applications such as fragmentation of cancer cells during shock-wave chemotherapy and cavitation-damage to human tissues during diagnostic ultrasound or lithotripsy. There are ongoing research efforts by major research centres, in the US, France, Russia and at AWE in the UK, to design increasingly better shock tube experiments in order to shed light on Richtmyer-Meshkov instability and turbulent mixing across material interfaces. There are, however, a number of difficulties associated with the nature of the shock tube experiments, including: problems with separating the initial gas regions; problems with the interpretation of visualisation images; and problems arising in that certain quantities of interest cannot be directly measured either because of their intrinsic nature (eg, vorticity) or because of practical limitations in the experimental set-up. Therefore, parallel to the experiments computational investigations need to be set up to validate computational methods and codes, which will ultimately be used to circumvent the aforementioned experimental limitations. The aim of the proposed work programme is to improve understanding of multi-component flows that feature RMI instabilities and turbulent mixing across gas interface, as well as to provide comprehensive information concerning the accuracy and implementation of best computer simulation practices. The research programme encompasses development of high-order and high-resolution computational methods, validation of the methods against novel shock-tube experiments, as well as theoretical modelling of the instabilities and turbulent mixing across material (gas) interfaces. The computational studies will be performed on high-performance, parallel computing facilities at Cranfield University.
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Organisation Website:	http://www.cranfield.ac.uk