Local Lagrangian reduced-order modeling for Rayleigh-Taylor instability by solution manifold decomposition

Abstract: Rayleigh-Taylor instability is a classical hydrodynamic instability of great interest in various disciplines of science and engineering, including astrophyics, atmospheric sciences and climate, geophysics, and fusion energy. Analytical methods cannot be applied to explain the long-time behavior of Rayleigh-Taylor instability, and therefore numerical simulation of the full problem is required. However, in order to capture the growth of amplitude of perturbations accurately, both the spatial and temporal discretization need to be extremely fine for traditional numerical methods, and the long-time simulation may become prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we propose efficient reduced order model techniques to accelerate the simulation of Rayleigh-Taylor instability in compressible gas dynamics. We introduce a general framework for decomposing the solution manifold to construct the temporal domain partition and temporally-local reduced order model construction with varying Atwood number. We propose two practical approaches in this framework, namely decomposition by using physical time and penetration distance respectively. Numerical results are presented to examine the performance of the proposed approaches.