On the initialization of Rayleigh-Taylor simulations

We demonstrate that, when initialized with experimental data, numerical simulations of Rayleigh-Taylor mixing show reasonable agreement with experimental measurements of the self-similar growth rate alpha. The experimental data include high-resolution velocity and density measurements from a closed water channel facility. For the simulations, a monotone integrated large eddy simulations technique was used that employed a finite-volume, Eulerian equation solver with van Leer flux limiters. Calculations were initialized with both density and velocity fluctuations. A comparison of the late-time, self-similar growth constant with the experiments showed simulations initialized with velocity perturbations gave better agreement with experiments. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.