Title: The Onset of Taylor Vortices - A New Look at an Old Problem

Speaker: Andrew Cliffe, University of Nottingham

Date/Time: May 27, 2008 at 10:00 - 11:00am

Location: CSRI Building, Room 90 (Sandia NM)

Brief Abstract: Taylor-Couette flow, the flow of an incompressible viscous fluid in the annular region between concentric circular cylinders driven by the rotation of one or both of the cylinders, has played an important role in the development of fluid dynamical stability theory since the seminal paper by G I Taylor, published in 1923. The primary importance of Taylor's work is that he was able to get good agreement between theory and experiment for the critical Reynolds number at which the basic Couette flow loses stability. This was the first time that such agreement had been obtained for any flow problem. Taylor's theory assumed the cylinders to be infinitely long. A new strand of research on this flow was initiated in the late 1970s by Benjamin, Mullin and Schaeffer, who were concerned with effects that arise from the fact that in any experiment the cylinders always have finite length. A number of new and interesting phenomena were discovered, all directly related to end effects. In particular, it was discovered that the onset of the so called Taylor vortices is always a smooth process, and not a bifurcation as Taylor assumed in his original theory. Nevertheless, for long cylinders the appearance of Taylor vortices seems to be an abrupt process. The talk will describe recent theoretical and numerical work (with Mullin and Schaeffer) that sheds new light on the Problem of the onset of Taylor vortices and goes some way to resolving this apparent contradiction.

CSRI POC: Eric Phipps, 284-9268