78th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics (Nov 23 — 25, 2025)

V001: High energy density shock driven Kelvin-Helmholtz instability

A shock-driven Kelvin-Helmholtz shear layer fluid experiment was simulated in 3D with the MARBL multiphysics code. MARBL is a high-order finite element arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) code developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and this simulation consists of 107 billion high-order quadrature points and ran on 2048 nodes of the El Capitan supercomputer using 8,192 AMD MI300a GPUs. The model is based on the experiment described in Hurricane et. al [1] which was performed at the Omega laser facility. The simulation model is driven by an energy source which matches the characteristics of the experimental laser drive and creates a strong shock wave that propagates across a two-material interface with a prescribed sinusoidal perturbation machined into it. Vorticity is generated at the interface since the pressure gradient from the shock and the density gradient at the interface are nearly orthogonal. Shown in the movie is a material subset rendering of the fluid density for the bottom layer (with the lower density top layer removed) and the surrounding experimental target package, highlighting the transmitted shock waves which interact with the various materials creating complex shear and shock flow patterns.[1] O. A. Hurricane, J. F. Hansen, H. F. Robey, B. A. Remington, M. J. Bono, E. C. Harding, R. P. Drake, and C. C. Kuranz. A high energy density shock driven kelvin-helmholtz shear layer experiment. Physics of Plasmas, 16(5), 2009.