Mixing driven by transient buoyancy flows.II. Flow dynamics

The chaotic advection of the interface between two miscible liquids inside a closed cavity, generated by a damped oscillatory buoyancy-driven (BD) regular flow field, is investigated experimentally for BD mixing. The Lagrangian history of interface motion, determined using the planar laser-induced fluorescence and the photographic full-field view method, is contrasted against the Eulerian flow field measured from particle image velocimetry. Chaotic advection stretches and folds the interface at an early stage to produce an asymmetric pairwise Rayleigh–Taylor (RT) morphology (RTM) structure from long wavelength RT instability and short-time Richtmyer–Meshkov instability and its fractal interface structure at a high impulsive-Reynolds number. The mechanism of folding, from global bifurcation of the flow field, caused by a hyperbolic point, served as an organizing center for multiple vortex interactions. The intermediate-stage kinematics of the RTM structure exhibits RT mixing and shows unfolding of the lamellar structure from the net effect of stretching, folding, and molecular diffusion prior to its breakdown; and it has a probabilistic outcome of exhibiting topological transitions through a breakup of the RTM structure in phase space from necking singularity and pinch-off, indicating sensitivity to the initial conditions. The effectiveness of mixing determined from mixing efficiency is contrasted against mechanical and lamellar models of mixing. The determination of topological entropy, from an approximate Gaussian distribution of the interface length stretch, yields time scale for information decay comparable to time scale for which a low-order horseshoe map emerges from flow, indicating local chaos of the interface. The late-stage breakdown of the RTM structure from internal and wall collision drives the interaction between advection and diffusion, which indicates that critical mixing time scales as the logarithmic of Peclet number, comparable to time-periodic sine flow and blinking vortex flow chaotic mapping models.