Investigation of Rayleigh-Taylor instability in copper plate under explosive loading

Abstract The Rayleigh–Taylor instability in metal is of great practical interest to a diverse range of fields, and it is significantly different from the traditional fluid interface instability. In this paper, a set of high explosives driven Rayleigh–Taylor instability experiments in copper plate are presented for intensively understanding the perturbation growth behavior of metal interface instability. The perturbation growth history on copper interface at a specific time is recorded by flash radiography. The experimental results show that the evolution of interface perturbation is sensitive to its initial perturbation characters under a given driving pressure, the larger the initial perturbation amplitude, the faster the perturbation grows, but the perturbation wavelength of the interface remains almost unchanged at the explosive loading. The perturbation on the front interface will influence the interface features of the back free interface over time. Namely, the position corresponding to the perturbation trough on the front interface gradually evolves into a peak and vice versa.