Are accurate equation of state parameters important in Richtmyer-Meshkov instabilities?; TOPICAL

The Richtmyer-Meshkov instability is a classical fluid dynamical instability that has been extensively studied to help understand turbulent mixing. A recent numerical simulation of a shock tube experiment with an air-SF6 interface and a weak shock (Mach 1.2) used the ideal gas equation of state for air and an artificially low temperature as a surrogate for the correct SF6 gas physics. We have run a similar problem with both the correct gas physics and three versions of the air surrogate to understand the errors thereby introduced. We find that for the weakly driven single-mode case considered here, the instability amplitude is not affected, the interface location is affected only slightly, but the thermodynamic states are quite different. This result is not surprising because the flow far from the shock waves is essentially incompressible