Linear and Secondary Instabilities in Incompressible Axisymmetric Boundary Layers Effect of.pdfVIP

Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) 8 N. Vinod Rama Govindarajan 0 0 Secondary Instabilities in Incompressible Axisymmetric 2 l Boundary Layers: Effect of Transverse Curvature u J 5 2 ] n y the date of receipt and acceptance should be inserted later d - u l Abstract The incompressible boundary layer in the axial flow past a cylinder has been shown Tutty et. f. al.([11]) to be stabler than a two-dimensional boundary layer, with the helical mode being the least stable. s In this paper the secondary instability of this flow is studied. The laminar flow is shown here to be always c stable at high transverse curvatures to secondary disturbances, which, together with a similar observation i s for the linear modes implies that the flow past a thin cylinder is likely to remain laminar. The azimuthal y wavenumber of the pair of least stable secondary modes (m+ and m−) are related to that of the primary (n) by h p m+ = 2n and m− = −n. The base flow is shown to be inviscidly stable at any curvature. [ Keywords Hydrodynamic stability Boundary layer 2 PACS 47.15.Cb 47.15.Fe 47.20.Lz v 3 2 2 1 Introduction 1 1 At low to moderate freestream disturbance levels, the first step in the process of transition to turbulence in a 6 boundary layer is that at some streamwise location, the laminar flow becomes unstable to linear disturbances. 0 / While this instability and the events that follow have been investigated in great detail for two-dimensional s boundary layers during the past century, much less work has been done on its axisymmetric counterpart, the c i incompressible boundary layer in the flow past a c