Solitary-like and modulated wavepackets in the Couette-Taylor with a radial temperature gradient
Please login to view abstract download link
Numerical and experimental studies of the flow in a large aspect ratio Couette-Taylor system with a rotating inner cylinder and a fixed radial temperature gradient are performed. The base flow state is a superposition of an azimuthal flow induced by rotation and an axial large convective cell induced by the temperature gradient. For a relatively large temperature gradient, the rotation rate of the inner cylinder destabilizes the convective cell to give rise to traveling wave pattern through a subcritical bifurcation. This wave pattern is associated to a temperature mode and it consists of helical vortices traveling in the annulus. In a small range of the rotation rate, helical vortices have longitudinal meandering leading to the formation of kinks randomly distributed, leading to spatio-temporal disordered patterns. The flow becomes regular for a large interval of rotation rate. The friction, the momentum and the heat transfer coefficients are computed and found to be independent of the heating direction (Kang et al. 2023).