Instability - Fluid Instabilities

Fluid Instabilities

Fluid instabilities occur in liquids, gases and plasmas, and are often characterized by the shape that form; they are studied in fluid dynamics and magnetohydrodynamics. Fluid instabilities include:

• Ballooning mode instability (some analogy to the Rayleigh–Taylor instability); found in the magnetosphere
• Atmospheric instability
  • Hydrodynamic instability or dynamic instability (atmospheric dynamics)
    • Inertial instability; baroclinic instability; symmetric instability, conditional symmetric or convective symmetric instability; barotropic instability; Helmholtz or shearing instability; rotational instability
  • Hydrostatic instability or static instability/vertical instability (parcel instability), thermodynamic instability (atmospheric thermodynamics)
    • Conditional or static instability, buoyant instability, latent instability, nonlocal static instability, conditional-symmetric instability; convective, potential, or thermal instability, convective instability of the first and second kind; absolute or mechanical instability
• Bénard instability
• Drift mirror instability
• Kelvin–Helmholtz instability (similar, but different from the diocotron instability in plasmas)
• Rayleigh–Taylor instability
• Plateau-Rayleigh instability (similar to the Rayleigh–Taylor instability)
• Richtmyer-Meshkov instability (similar to the Rayleigh–Taylor instability)
• Shock Wave Instability