The Effect of Liquid Tamping Media on the Growth of Richtmyer–Meshkov Instability in Copper

The Richtmyer–Meshkov instability (RMI) arises at an impulsively accelerated interface between two materials of different density. Historically, this instability was studied in fluids. Recently, RMI studies have been extended to investigate material properties of solids. Material strength at high strain-rates in solids have been extracted from the amplitude and growth of the RMI spike in an untamped environment, specifically, the metal-vacuum interface. This technique has also been shown to elucidate material properties in a distended tamping media, metal-porous solid interface. Here, a bridge to understanding the nonlinear mechanical behavior of copper into a liquid tamping media is investigated experimentally and computationally. We show the RMI growth rate and resulting profile are dependent on initial shock strength, as well as the nondimensional perturbation, with an initial Atwood number of $$-0.78$$ . Data collected from a tamped liquid environment range in metal breakout pressures up to ten GPa. This information is used to calibrate and validate numeric model parameters. The oscillatory shock front in the liquid tamping media is used to approximate the viscosity from a transient 1-D analytic approximation. The viscosity is found to be in agreement with other experimental work, however is not determined to be the only dissipative force in the experiment. Hydrocode simulations of our experiments show reasonable alignment with current and previously published work.