A design of a two-dimensional, supersonic KH experiment on OMEGA-EP

An experiment meant to investigate the evolution of single mode Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) instability in the supersonic regime is presented and theoretically analyzed. This experiment is intended to provide a direct measurement of the two-dimensional vortex evolution so that the high-Mach-number effects can be measured. The proposed design takes advantage of the ability of OMEGA-EP to drive experiments for up to 30 ns to produce steady conditions for KH that endure long enough to observe substantial growth. KH growth for the proposed design has been analyzed using two-dimensional numerical simulations. The results were compared to synthetic temporal KH numerical simulations using non-dimensional scaling in the low and high Mach number regime. The comparisons show that the growth in the high Mach number regime is expected to be suppressed by up to a factor of two. The effects of two-dimensional rarefactions from the lateral boundaries of the experimental system were also investigated. It was found that they introduce no major uncertainties or hazards to the experiment. We produced simulated radiographs, which show that the proposed experimental system will enable observation of the KH structures. An experiment of this kind has not yet been performed, and therefore would serve to validate numerical results and analytical models presented here and in the literature. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.