Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Vol.50, No.23, 13250-13257, 2011
Stabilizing the Interface in the Rayleigh-Taylor and the Saffman-Taylor Problems by Heating
We can stabilize the Rayleigh-Taylor instability to perturbations of any wavelength by heating from above. The same is true for the Saffman-Taylor instability. We present formulas for estimating the temperature difference required to do this and find that more reasonable temperature differences obtain in the Saffman-Taylor problem because the temperature dependence of the viscosity is much stronger than the temperature dependence of the density.