Recent progress in turbulent mixing

The purpose of this note is to summarize recent progress of the authors in understanding turbulent mixing. We consider both Rayleigh–Taylor (RT) and Richtmyer–Meshkov (RM) instabilities and mixing. Numerical simulations, theory and analysis of experimental data are combined to reach our conclusions. Three challenges that serve to organize our results are: (I) To compare to experiment when most experiments did not measure initial conditions. (II) To remove the effect of models and base science on fundamental equations. (III) To investigate high or infinite Reynolds (Re) regime for which the existing laboratory experiments may have diminished relevance. The results summarized here raise the possibility of verification and validation (V&V)/uncertainty quantification (UQ) for high Re simulations of RT/RM mixing.