Stability of a cylindrically imploding liquid cavity formed through a honeycomb mesh*

A gas-filled cylindrical cavity is created by rotating a liquid to solid body rotation, thus creating a cylindrical liquid shell surrounding the gas-filled cavity. The liquid shell is then radially imploded causing the gas-filled cavity to compress and hence collapse. It has been shown (DFD18-002341) that the angular velocity of the solid body rotation plays a significant role in the stability of the Rayleigh-Taylor driven perturbation growth on the cavity surface. In this talk, an initial perturbation is created by pushing the rotating liquid through a cylindrical honeycomb mesh i.e. one in which the depth of the mesh, d, is several times larger than the mesh size, M, and wall thickness t; as the fluid emerges from the honeycomb mesh, a series of jet interactions occur creating the initial perturbation. We experimentally investigate the effects of initial liquid depth, relative to the honeycomb mesh surface, on the stability of the imploding cavity surface. The cavity surface was measured using high-speed videography for a range of liquid depths ranging between -M (i.e. the liquid started inside the honeycomb) to M (liquid is one mesh length in front), sufficient to capture the change from a rough cavity surface to a smooth interface.