SHEAR-LAYER INSTABILITY IN A ROTATING SYSTEM

The observation of a shear flow instability in a rotating system with a soap membrane

2014 A pattern of driven vortices can be observed in the shear layer created in a fluid by a rotation movement. We present such an experiment where a liquid membrane is used to close a thin experimental volume of air thus forming a wall with the following properties : 2014 The parallel component of the fluid velocity does not have to be zero at the boundary. 2014 The interference fringes provid...

Shear layer instability at low reynolds numbers

Instability Associated Baroclinic Critical Layers in Rotating Stratified Shear Flow

The notion of over-reflection has been used to rationalize the linear instability of shear flows that are directed and sheared in a horizontal plane but stratified and subject to rotation in the vertical. In the linear stability analysis of these types of flows, two types of critical levels may appear that translate to singular points in the corresponding differential eigenvalue problem. The fi...

Saturation of inertial instability in rotating planar shear flows

Inertial instability in a rotating shear flow redistributes absolute linear momentum in such a way as to neutralize the instability. In the absence of other instabilities, the final equilibrium can be predicted by a simple construction based on conservation of total momentum. Numerical simulations, invariant in the along-stream direction, suppress barotropic instability and allow only inertial ...

Shear layer instability in a highly diffusive stably stratified atmosphere

The linear stability of a shear layer in a highly diffusive stably stratified atmosphere has been investigated. This study completes and extends previous works by Dudis (1974) and Jones (1977). We show that (i) an asymptotic regime is reached in the limit of large thermal diffusivity, (ii) there exists two different types of unstable modes. The slowest growing modes correspond to predominantly ...