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

Read more about this topic:  Instability

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