A multiphase flow model for the unstable mixing of incompressible layered materials

In this paper, a model for the unstable mixing of n parallel or concentric incompressible fluid layers is proposed. The approach in constructing this model is pairwise, based on a known two-incompressible-fluid mixing model. The problem complexity increases significantly in going from two to three fluids, but the increase in complexity is relatively small thereafter. We present a detailed study of the n=3 problem, which displays all of the difficult modeling issues applicable to arbitrary n≥3 while still being reasonably tractable.