Influence of capillary number on nonlinear Rayleigh-Taylor instability to the Navier-Stokes-Korteweg equations

Abstract

Motivated by Bresch, Desjardins, Gisclon and Sart (2008), in this paper, we study the influence of capillary number on an instability result related to the Navier-Stokes-Korteweg equations. Precisely, we investigate the instability of a steady-state profile with a heavier fluid lying above a lighter fluid, i.e., to study the Rayleigh-Taylor instability problem if the capillary number is below the critical value. After writing the nonlinear equations in a perturbed form, the first part is to provide a spectral analysis showing that, there exist possibly multiple normal modes to the linearized equations by following the operator method of Lafitte-Nguyen (2022). Hence, we construct a wide class of initial data for which the nonlinear perturbation problem departs from the equilibrium, based on the finding of possibly multiple normal modes. Using a refined framework of Guo-Strauss (1995), we prove the nonlinear instability.