Two-Dimensional Rayleigh-Taylor Instability in Incompressible Fluids at Arbitrary Atwood Numbers

The Rayleigh-Taylor instability in two-dimensional incompressible fluids at arbitrary Atwood numbers is studied by expanding the perturbation velocity potential to third order. The second and third harmonic generation effects of single-mode perturbation are analyzed, as well as the nonlinear correction to the exponential growth of the fundamental modulation. The mode coupling coefficients are dependent on the Atwood numbers. Our simulations support the weakly nonlinear results. We find that the ratio of the nonlinear saturation amplitude η_s and the perturbation wavelength λ is dependent on the Atwood number A_T and the relation is η_s/λ=(1/π)√2/5/√(1+3A_T² ).