Extreme Mechanics Letters 55 (2022) 101809

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Extreme Mechanics Letters

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eml

Hypergravitational Rayleigh–Taylor instability in solids

Kecheng Li a ,1 , Guodong Zhuo a ,1 , Yinnan Zhang a , Congshan Liu a , Weiqiu Chen c,d,e ,
∗
Chaofeng Lü a,b,d,e ,
a
College of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, PR China
b
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering & Mechanics, Ningbo University, Ningbo 315211, PR China
c
Department of Engineering Mechanics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, PR China
d
Key Lab of Soft Machines and Smart Devices of Zhejiang Province, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, PR China
e
Soft Matter Research Center, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, PR China

article info a b s t r a c t

Article history: Rayleigh–Taylor instability in solids results from the competition and dominance of the gravitational
Received 15 March 2022 potential against the elastic counterpart. We reveal systematically the phenomenon of hypergravita-
Received in revised form 26 April 2022 tional Rayleigh–Taylor instability in solids by exploiting a novel approach of centrifugal hypergravity.
Accepted 4 June 2022
A hydrogel plate is placed in a centrifuge with its free surface transforming from a flat state to a
Available online 11 June 2022
patterned state as the centrifugal gravity increases and exceeds a certain threshold. The experiments
Keywords: show that the centrifugal hypergravity enhances the gravitational potential and thus may induce
Hypergravitational Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities in thinner, lighter and stiffer hydrogel plates in contrast to the Earth gravity. There exists a
instability dimensionless critical hypergravity for a wider range of geometric size, mass density, elastic modulus
Hydrogel and gravitational acceleration, beyond which the post-buckling pattern is sensitive to the aspect ratio
Centrifugal hypergravity of the plate. We demonstrate that the theoretical results for the Earth gravity may be extended to
Post-buckling patterns hypergravitational scenario for plates with lateral boundary confinement. These findings may provide
a better understanding of the stabilities in natural solids under hypergravity and may pave a new way
of realizing specific fabrications in industries.
© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction flow, so that the theory of Rayleigh–Taylor instability has been

Rayleigh–Taylor instability (RTI), a gravity-driven instability,
arises when a dense fluid above another lighter fluid, and has
been well observed and studied in fluid flow due to the influence
of gravity on the Earth [1–7]. If the interface between different
fluids is slightly distorted, the relatively dense fluid sinks and
penetrates the underlying lighter fluid, leading to the decrease in
the gravitational potential of the system. The grown instabilities
of the interface are driven by the density difference and the
acceleration of the fluids. This instability phenomenon also exists
in solids for a wide range of time and space scales and plays an
important role in a lot of engineering applications, such as inertial
confinement fusion [8–10] and transmission of sediments [11].
In particular, the material strength of a solid can be inferred
by measurements of this instability growth on the surface of
accelerated solids [12,13]. On the other hand, RTI is also of rel-
evance to some natural processes. It has long been realized that
geodynamic processes can be described in terms of slow viscous
∗ Corresponding author at: College of Civil Engineering and Architecture,
Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, PR China.
E-mail address: lucf@zju.edu.cn (C. Lü).
1 These authors contribute equally to this work.
extensively used to model the formation of intraplate orogeny
and mantle plumes [14,15]. Other examples were explored in
astrophysics and the explosion of supernova [16–18] that may
always subject to high acceleration or hypergravity. As the gravity
may significantly affect the mechanical behavior of soft matter,
RTI may also relate to the surface morphology of biological tissues
such as intestinal tissue and brain [19–21], as well as the wrinkles
occurring on pilots’ skin when the aircraft is accelerating in
human spaceflight [22].
Recently, the RTI of a soft solid with its free surface fac-
ing downward was demonstrated experimentally and described
through a linear analysis [23]. Different from fluid, whether the
free surface remains flat or distorted depends on the competition
between the gravitational potential energy and strain energy of
the solid, which may be designated by the normalized parameter
ρ gH/µ with g denoting the Earth’s gravity (g ≈ 9.8m/s2 ), ρ ,
H and µ respectively the mass density, thickness and elastic
shear modulus of the soft solid. The RTI occurs when the grav-
itational potential overcomes the elasticity beyond an instability
threshold. A nonlinear analysis demonstrated that the hexagonal
pattern on the free surface of an infinite elastic slab is energet-
ically favorable and stable near the threshold value, for which
the illustrative experiments were performed in a finite slab [24].

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eml.2022.101809
2352-4316/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
K. Li, G. Zhuo, Y. Zhang et al.
However, for an elastic slab with finite size, the critical load and
instability patterns depend largely on the lateral confinement,
viscoelasticity and compressibility [25,26], as well as the ratio of
thickness, shear moduli and density for two-layered solids [27].
Here, for the first time, we demonstrate experimentally that
with the assistance of centrifugal acceleration, hypergravitational
Rayleigh–Taylor instability (HRTI) may occur in solids that re-
mains stable under the Earth’s gravity. We report a novel ap-
proach for enhancing the gravitational potential by exploiting
centrifugal acceleration to investigate the influence of the gravity
intensity on RTI in an elastic soft plate. The centrifugal force is
an outward body force that pushes a rotating body away from
its rotation axis. It has similar effects on the mechanical behavior
of matters and can therefore be used to provide a hypergravity,
but also enable to study RTI in soft solids with a wider range
of geometric size, elastic modulus, and gravitational acceleration.
The chronical evolution in the surface morphology of the soft
solid with the change of gravity intensity is revealed experi-
mentally. We obtain the critical condition for the HRTI through
a linear stability analysis, and the post-buckling patterns are
simulated by finite element simulations. This work may provide
a lab evidence to the natural instability of solids under hyper-
gravity as well as a novel method for design and fabrication of
(micro)patterning [28].
2. Material and method
The experiments are performed in a specifically designed cen-
trifuge with a camera system rotating with a spindle sketched in
Fig. 1a. The soft sample is tailored in a plate shape with different
radius R and thickness H in an acrylic container that is fixed
in the steel load container (Fig. 1b). The camera is installed at
the end of the rotating arm and set facing to the free surface
of the sample, which rotates synchronously with the sample and
remains relatively static to each other. A detailed description of
the centrifuge operation and result recording process may refer
to Supplementary Materials, part A.
The soft solid sample selected in this experiment is poly-
acrylamide hydrogel with a mass density of 1.077 ± 0.05g/cm3 .
The polyacrylamide hydrogels is prepared by copolymerization of
acrylamide (AAm, 30g/L) and bisacrylamide (MBAA, 1g/L) in the
presence of initiators, tetramethylenediamine (TEMED, 0.6g/L)
and ammonium persulfate (APS, 1g/L), in deionized water. Then,
2% silane coupling agent KH-550 is added to the solution for mak-
ing the hydrogel well bonded to the wall of the acrylic container.
By controlling the concentration of monomers and cross-linkers
in the solution before gelling, we can easily regulate the shear
modulus of the hydrogel. However, it depends significantly on the
temperature and humidity of curing environment even though
the compositions are kept the same. As a result, the shear modu-
lus of the hydrogel samples for the tests ranges from 49 ∼ 68 Pa
which are measured from the indentation test with a force sensor
of a maximum range of 50 N(Supplementary Materials, part B).
To study the critical load and final post-buckling patterns of
the soft hydrogel, finite element simulations are conducted by
using the commercial software ABAQUS. An incompressible Neo-
Hookean model with radius R and thickness H is subjected to
gravitational acceleration g in the y direction, and hypergravity
Ng in the z direction. The bottom and lateral surface of the cylin-
der are both fixed to simulate the confinement of the container.
The element type is a simplified integral 8-node hybrid linear
brick (C3D8RH). We first perform buckling analysis to obtain
the critical load and buckle mode of the instability. Then, we
introduce a small geometrical perturbation consisting of multiple
superimposed buckling modes on the surface of the cylinder
before simulation for post-buckling analysis by using the Riks
method.
2
Extreme Mechanics Letters 55 (2022) 101809
3. Results and discussion
3.1. Experiments
Fig. 2 exhibits the morphology evolution of a hydrogel plate
as the rotating speed increases. The hydrogel plate has a geo-
metrical size of R = 6.5cm and H = 0.783cm, mass density
ρ ≈ 1.089g/cm3 and shear modulus µ ≈ 60.9Pa. When the
rotating speed is zero, the free surface of the hydrogel plate
remains perfectly flat without geometric distortion (Fig. 2a). As
the rotating speed increases, the slight deformation induced by
the combination effects of the centrifugal and Earth’s gravity be-
comes obvious (Fig. 2b–c). When the centrifugal gravity exceeds
4.9 g, the hydrogel deforms significantly (Fig. 2d) and apparent
cuvettes appear suddenly from the bottom right (Fig. 2e). Sub-
sequently, more cuvettes are induced with a slight increase in
the rotating speed (Fig. 2f) and eventually spread over the entire
slab. These cuvettes evolve to perfect hexagonal patterns around
6.9 g (Fig. 2g) and remain almost unchanged even with a slight
increase of the hypergravity (Fig. 2h). For further observation on
the phenomenon of HRTI, we performed a series of centrifuge
tests on hydrogel plates with different radii of R = 3.0 cm,
5.0cm and 6.5cm. Figs. S3–S8 exhibits the evolution of the surface
morphology of the hydrogels with respect to the hypergravity
intensity for selected cases. The dynamic evolution procedure of
the hydrogels may refer to the video (Supplementary Materials,
movie S1). From all examined cases, the evolution path of the
patterns with the increasing hypergravity differs from case to
case and always deviates from the vertical axis of the sample,
which is basically owing to the material imperfection that stems
from the processing of the samples.
Based on the series of centrifugal tests on various hydro-
gel samples, the critical hypergravity for the onset of apparent
cuvettes is recorded for different thicknesses (Fig. 3). For each in-
dividual radius, the critical hypergravity decreases monotonically
with the thickness when the mass density and shear modulus
in experiment are kept the same. This indicates that thicker
hydrogels are more prone to lose stability while the thinner re-
quire a larger hypergravity to induce instability. However, for an
arbitrary thickness in Fig. 3, the critical hypergravity for the case
of R = 3.0 cm and R = 5.0 cm are always larger than R = 6.5 cm
that has a larger mass density and much lower shear modulus.
These observations are easy to understand since a plate with
larger thickness or larger mass density and lower shear modulus
has a larger gravitational potential than the opposite counterpart
under the same hypergravity to overcome the elasticity to distort
the free surface.
To better understand the underlying mechanism, a dimension-
less hypergravity factor, α = ρ NgH/µ, is defined to quantify the
effects of hypergravity on the hydrogel’s deformation, where N
is the times of the Earth’s gravity to denote the hypergravity
intensity. For all tests in Fig. 3, the average critical hypergravity
factor αc are obtained as 6.20 ± 0.4, 6.21 ± 0.14 and 6.30 ±
0.18 for the three radius cases (Fig. 4). This indicates that, the
dimensionless critical hypergravity factor αc remains almost the
same for plates with various thicknesses and a given radius. In
addition, even though the material properties are different, the
factor αc deviates very slightly to each other.
3.2. Linear stability analysis and post-buckling simulation
A theoretical finite deformation model with the neo-Hookean
solid is also developed based on a linear stability analysis [25] to
understand rationally the onset mechanism of HRTI (Supplemen-
tary Materials, part D). Based on the finite deformation analyses,
the hypergravity factor α is found scaling to the combined pa-
rameter mH/R of the hydrogel plate according to the following
K. Li, G. Zhuo, Y. Zhang et al. Extreme Mechanics Letters 55 (2022) 101809

Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of experimental setup. (a) The work bench of the centrifuge. The load container and camera are located on the rotating arm that is
connected to the rotating spindle driven by a motor. The rotational radius of the load container can be altered as 20cm, 25cm and 30cm. (b) The photography of a
hydrogel plate in the acrylic container. A grid paper at the bottom of the transparent acrylic container is used to facilitate clear recognition on the deformation of
the hydrogel plate. (c) Schematic diagram of the confined hydrogel plate under hypergravity.

Fig. 2. The evolution of the surface morphology of a hydrogel plate with R=6.5cm, H =0.783 cm, µ ≈ 60.9 Pa with the increase of hypergravity. (a) The surface of
the hydrogel is flat. (b)–(c) The surface morphologies are almost the same. A slight deformation can be observed at the edge of the container. (d) The surface of the
hydrogel is suddenly and obviously deformed. (e)–(h) The surface morphology evolves gradually to a stable hexagonal pattern as the rotating speed increases until
the hypergravity value reaches 6.9 g.

characteristic equation, where m is the radial wave number. This indicates that for a
2 fixed aspect ratio R/H, Eq. (1) gives a function to determine
ρ NgH 2m HR 2 m HR
( ) ( )
H 1 + cosh + dimensionless load with different radial wave number m. And
α= = 2m (1)
µ 2m HR 2m HR there always exists a minimum α , i.e. the critical value αc or Nc
( )
R sinh +
3
K. Li, G. Zhuo, Y. Zhang et al. Extreme Mechanics Letters 55 (2022) 101809

Fig. 3. Experimental measurements of the critical hypergravity Nc g as a function of the thickness H. The mass density and shear moduli corresponding to
R = 3cm, 5cm and 6.5cm are ρ ≈ 1.050 g/cm3 , 1.017 g/cm3 and 1.094 g/cm3 , µ ≈ 55.0Pa, 63.0Pa and 55.0Pa, respectively.

Fig. 4. Dependence of the critical hypergravity factor αc on the aspect ratio R/H from numerical calculations, FEM simulations and experiments.

of instability [25], for attaining a specific stable mode that corre-
sponds to the onset of apparent cuvettes recorded in the tests in
Figs. 2 and 3. For all tests in Fig. 3, both the theoretical predictions
and numerical simulations using finite element method (FEM)
for the critical hypergravity intensity Nc agree very well with
the experimental observations (Fig. 3). The critical hypergravity
factor αc remains almost constant with respect to the aspect
ratio R/H for all tested samples and is identical to the theoretical
predictions and FEM simulations, i.e. αc ≈ 6.22 (Fig. 4). This αc ∼
R/H scaling law indicates that, although the critical hypergravity
for onset of HRTI varies with the radius, thickness, mass density
and shear modulus, the dimensionless critical hypergravity factor
αc for the considered cases remains constant. These phenomena
are similar as the RTI under the Earth’s gravity [23]. This may
provide a more robotic and flexible strategy for controlling the
RTI in solids based on combination use of hypergravity with
material and geometric parameters.
4
Beyond the critical hypergravity, the surface morphology of
the hydrogel plate evolves gradually to a stable hexagonal pat-
tern (Fig. 2). To further investigate the post-buckling behaviors,
the final stable patterns for different aspect ratios are recorded
(Fig. 5). As R/H increases, the number of cuvettes in the final
pattern increases, but the width of the cuvettes decreases, and, for
R/H ≥ 4.70, the final post-buckling patterns approach to perfect
hexagons. These hexagonal patterns are also predicted theoreti-
cally for both the hydrogel plates under normal gravity [24] and
film–substrate system under biaxial compression [29]. Following
a weakly nonlinear analysis [24], the hexagonal pattern may be
obtained quantitatively with its dimensionless width λ/R derived
as (Supplementary Materials, part E)
λ 4π H
= √ (2)
R 3kc R
K. Li, G. Zhuo, Y. Zhang et al. Extreme Mechanics Letters 55 (2022) 101809

Fig. 5. The final post-buckling patterns of hydrogels with different aspect ratios under hypergravity.

Fig. 6. Comparison of the experimental buckling width (λ/R) of the hexagonal pattern with the theoretical prediction and the FEM simulations for different aspect
ratios under hypergravity.

Here, kc = mc H /R ≈ 2.12 is the critical wave number where
mc is determined according to Eq. (1) together with αc . Fig. 6
shows the relationship between the width of cuvettes and the ge-
ometrical size of hydrogel plate. The dimensionless width λ/R of
the hexagonal patterns decreases non-linearly with the increase
of the aspect ratios R/H. Note that when the stable hexagonal
pattern occurs, its width λ does not vary with the hypergravity
5
factor α , indicating that the wave length is only dependent on
the geometric size of the hydrogel plate. These post-buckling
phenomena are also well predicted using FEM simulations. These
excellent agreements between the simulations and experiments
enable to design and control of various patterns through the HRTI
for (micro)fabrications.
K. Li, G. Zhuo, Y. Zhang et al.
4. Conclusion
In summary, we have demonstrated hypergravitational
Rayleigh–Taylor instability in soft solids by exploiting the cen-
trifuge experiment. With the increasing of rotating speed of the
centrifuge and thus the centrifugal hypergravity, the hydrogel
surface evolves from a flat state to a buckled state with structured
cuvettes. A finite deformation model was developed to predict
the onset of HRTI and the post-buckling patterns, which agrees
very well with the experimental results and the finite element
simulations. The mechanism lies in that the hypergravity en-
hances the gravitational potential to overcome the elastic energy
stored in the hydrogel plate. The findings indicate that hyper-
gravity may provide a new way of tuning the Rayleigh–Taylor
instability of solids from the aspect of gravitational potential. This
broke the limitations encountered in Earth’s gravity that only
geometrical and material properties are tunable. The results may
offer references for interpreting natural instabilities associated
with hypergravity, healthcare in hypergravity environments, and
industrial fabrication of (micro)patterning.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (No. 11925206 and No. 51988101), and the
Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No.
LD21A020002).
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary material related to this article can be found
online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eml.2022.101809.
References
[1] D.H. Sharp, An overview of Rayleigh–Taylor instability, Physica D 12 (1984)
3–18.
[2] J. Fernandez, P. Kurowski, P. Petitjeans, et al., Density-driven unstable flows
of miscible fluids in a Hele-Shaw cell, J. Fluid Mech. 451 (2002) 239–260.
[3] S.IA. Barzhi, Review of theoretical modelling approaches of Rayleigh–Taylor
instabilities and turbulent mixing, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. A 368 (2010)
1809–1828.
[4] Y Zhou, WH Cabot, Time-dependent study of anisotropy in Rayleigh–Taylor
instability induced turbulent flows with a variety of density ratios, Phys.
Fluids 31 (2019) 084106.
[5] H. Jiang, X. Zhu, D. Wang, et al., Supergravitational turbulent thermal
convection, Sci. Adv. 6 (2020) eabb8676.
Extreme Mechanics Letters 55 (2022) 101809
[6] S. Alqatari, TE. Videbæk, SR. Nagel, et al., Confinement-induced stabilization
of the Rayleigh–Taylor instability and transition to the unconfined limit,
Sci. Adv. 6 (2020) eabd6605.
[7] N. Sabet, H. Hassanzadeh, AD. Wit, et al., Scalings of rayleigh-taylor
instability at large viscosity contrasts in porous media, Phys. Rev. Lett.
126 (2021) 094501.
[8] TR Dittrich, BA Hammel, CJ Keane, et al., Diagnosis of pusher-fuel mix in
indirectly driven nova implosions, Phys. Rev. Lett. 73 (1994) 2324.
[9] HS Park, OA Hurricane, DA Callahan, et al., High-adiabat high-foot inertial
confinement fusion implosion experiments on the national ignition facility,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 112 (2014) 055001.
[10] LF Wang, WH Ye, JF Wu, et al., A scheme for reducing deceleration-phase
Rayleigh–Taylor growth in inertial confinement fusion implosions, Phys.
Plasmas 23 (2016) 052713.
[11] YJ Chou, Y.C. Shao, Numerical study of particle-induced Rayleigh–Taylor
instability: Effects of particle settling and entrainment, Phys. Fluids 28
(2016) 043302.
[12] JD Colvin, M Legrand, BA Remington, et al., A model for instability growth
in accelerated solid metals, J. Appl. Phys. 93 (2003) 5287–5301.
[13] KT Lorenz, MJ Edwards, SG Glendinning, et al., Accessing ultrahigh-
pressure, quasiisentropic states of matter, Phys. Plasmas 12 (2005)
056309.
[14] J Dannberg, S.V. Sobolev, Low-buoyancy thermochemical plumes resolve
controversy of classical mantle plume concept, Nature Commun. 6 (2015)
1–9.
[15] W Gorczyk, K. Vogt, Tectonics and melting in intra-continental settings,
Gondwana Res. 27 (2015) 196–208.
[16] A. Burrows, Supernova explosions in the universe, Nature 403 (2000)
727–733.
[17] H. Isobe, T. Miyagoshi, Shibata. K., et al., Filamentary structure on the sun
from the magnetic Rayleigh–Taylor instability, Nature 434 (2005) 478–481.
[18] W.H. Cabot, AW Cook, Reynolds number effects on Rayleigh–Taylor insta-
bility with possible implications for type ia supernovae, Nat. Phys. 2 (2006)
562–568.
[19] MB Amar, F. Jia, Anisotropic growth shapes intestinal tissues during
embryogenesis, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 110 (2013) 10525–10530.
[20] S. Budday, C. Raybaud, E. Kuhl, A mechanical model predicts morphological
abnormalities in the developing human brain, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 1–7.
[21] L LeGoff, T. Lecuit, Mechanical forces and growth in animal tissues, Cold
Spring Harbor Perspect. Biol. 8 (2016) a019232.
[22] T. Frett, G. Petrat, JJ van Loon, et al., Hypergravity facilities in the ESA
ground-based facility program–current research activities and future tasks,
Microgravity Sci. Technol. 28 (2016) 205, 214.
[23] S. Mora, T. Phou, JM Fromental, et al., Gravity driven instability in elastic
solid layers, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113 (2014) 178301.
[24] A. Chakrabarti, S. Mora, F. Richard, et al., Selection of hexagonal buckling
patterns by the elastic Rayleigh–Taylor instability, J. Mech. Phys. Solids 121
(2018) 234–257.
[25] Y. Zheng, Y. Lai, Y. Hu, et al., Rayleigh–Taylor instability in a confined
elastic soft cylinder, J. Mech. Phys. Solids 131 (2019) 221–229.
[26] S.I. Tamim, J.B. Bostwick, A dynamic analysis of the Rayleigh–Taylor
instability in soft solids, Extreme Mech. Lett. 40 (2020) 100940.
[27] D Riccobelli, P. Ciarletta, Rayleigh–Taylor instability in soft elastic layers,
Philos. Trans. R. Soc. A 375 (2093) (2017) 20160421.
[28] S Mora, F. Richard, Buckling of a compliant hollow cylinder attached to a
rotating rigid shaft, Int. J. Solids Struct. 167 (2019) 142–155.
[29] X. Huang, B. Li, W. Hong, et al., Effects of tension–compression asymmetry
on the surface wrinkling of film–substrate systems, J. Mech. Phys. Solids
94 (2016) 88–104.