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1996•Physical Review LettersRequires access

Turbulent Bursts in Couette-Taylor Flow

Katie Coughlin, Philip Marcus

Open publisher page 52 citations

Abstract

We present a physical explanation of turbulent bursts in the flow between concentric, rotating cylinders (Couette-Taylor flow), based on fully resolved direct numerical calculations. The bursts are a temporal oscillation between a spatially laminar flow and turbulence, discovered experimentally by Hamill et al. The onset of turbulence is shown to be due to a linear instability of the spiral flow, discovered in our calculations and since confirmed experimentally.

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What this paper is about

We present a physical explanation of turbulent bursts in the flow between concentric, rotating cylinders (Couette-Taylor flow), based on fully resolved direct numerical calculations. The bursts are a temporal oscillation between a spatially laminar flow and turbulence, discovered experimentally by Hamill et al. The onset of turbulence is shown to be due to a linear instability of the spiral flow, discovered in our calculations and since confirmed experimentally.

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OpenAlex reports 52 citations for this work. Citation counts describe recorded attention and do not establish research quality.

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Available abstract

We present a physical explanation of turbulent bursts in the flow between concentric, rotating cylinders (Couette-Taylor flow), based on fully resolved direct numerical calculations. The bursts are a temporal oscillation between a spatially laminar flow and turbulence, discovered experimentally by Hamill et al. The onset of turbulence is shown to be due to a linear instability of the spiral flow, discovered in our calculations and since confirmed experimentally.

Key concepts: Taylor–Couette flow, Turbulence, Couette flow, Laminar flow, Physics, Mechanics, Instability, Flow (mathematics)

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