Stability of Laboratory Shear Flows

Evidence, both theoretical and experimental, is accumulating to support a mechanism for transition to turbulence in shear flow based on the 3-D secondary instability of finite 2-D departures from plane parallelism. It is of central importance for using...

Transition to turbulence in plane channel flow occurs even for conditions under which modes of the linearized dynamical system associated with the flow are stable. In this paper an attempt is made to understand this phenomena by finding the linear three...

The mean streak spacing of approximately 100 wall units that is observed in wall-bounded turbulent shear flow is shown to be consistent with near-wall streamwise vortices optimally configured to gain the most energy over an appropriate turbulent eddy...

The three-dimensional perturbations to viscous constant shear flow that increase maximally in energy over a chosen time interval are obtained by optimizing over the complete set of analytic solutions. These optimal perturbations are intrinsically three...

Disturbance structures that achieve maximum growth over a specified interval of time have recently been obtained for unbounded constant shear flow making use of closed-form solutions. Optimal perturbations have also been obtained for the canonical bounded...