The Rayleigh–Taylor instability for the Verigin problem with and without phase transition

Isothermal compressible two-phase flows in a capillary are modeled with and without phase transition in the presence of gravity, employing Darcy’s law for the velocity field. It is shown that the resulting systems are thermodynamically consistent in the sense that the available energy is a strict Lyapunov functional. In both cases, the equilibria with flat interface are identified. It is shown that the problems are well-posed in an $$L_p$$ -setting and generate local semiflows in the proper state manifolds. The main result concerns the stability of equilibria with flat interface, i.e. the Rayleigh–Taylor instability.