Growing Fingers in the Strongly Nonlinear
             Richtmyer-Meshkov Instability

 
             Toshio Yoshikawa, Univ. of Utah

             INSCC 110, 3:30pm  Friday April 24th, 1998


                          Abstract

The Richtmyer-Meshkov instability is a fingering instability that occurs
when a shock wave passes an interface between two fluids. 
It leads to the formation of fingers of the heavy fluid growing into
the light fluid.

This instability is one of the main problems of inertial confinement
nuclear fusion.
Due to the strong nonlinearity of the govering equation and  the high
distortion of the interface, the description of the growing fingers
is difficult for both analytical and numerical approaches.

In this talk  we propose a model that enables us to describe the 
growing fingers.
The model is  based on a variational principle and conformal
mapping.
In the limit of strong nonlinearity, it gives a simple integrable
Hamiltonian system. 
Using the solution of this system, we analyze properties of 
the fingers such as the growth rate and singularity formation. 

Requests for preprints and reprints to: tyoshika@math.utah.edu 
This source can be found at http://www.math.utah.edu/applied-math/