Matthew Bird with Charles Rosenblatt

 Long Term Behavior of Rayleigh-Taylor Instabilities in Immiscible Fluids with Precise Control of Initial Conditions

A magnetic field is used to pull a less dense paramagnetic fluid below a fluid of higher density. A Rayleigh-Taylor instability occurs when the magnetic field is turned off and the denser fluid falls to the bottom. The goal of this project is to study the long-term behavior of the instability in order to compare the results with theory. Since most computational work has been done with high Atwood numbers, the experiment will ideally be performed with fluids of dramatically different densities.