We present computational and experimental results involving instability development in the gravity-driven flow of thin fluid films on heterogeneous surfaces, with particular emphasis on the dynamics of the fluid fronts. We show that heterogeneity of the solid surface can have a significant effect on the flow dynamics. Since the effect of heterogeneity often competes with the basic instability m...

An experimental investigation of mixing mechanisms in a shock-induced instability flow is described. We obtain quantitative two-dimensional maps of the heavy-gas (SF6) concentration using planar laser-induced fluorescence for the case of a shockaccelerated cylinder of heavy gas in air. The instantaneous scalar dissipation rate, or mixing rate, χ , is estimated experimentally for the first time ...

Linear stability and the nonmodal transient energy growth in compressible plane Couette flow are investigated for two prototype mean flows: (a) the uniform shear flow with constant viscosity, and (b) the nonuniform shear flow with stratified viscosity. Both mean flows are linearly unstable for a range of supersonic Mach numbers (M). For a given M , the critical Reynolds number (Re) is significa...

In the present work, the effect of fluid’s elasticity was investigated on the hydrodynamic instability of Blasius flow. To determine the critical Reynolds number as a function of the elasticity number, a two-dimensional linear temporal stability analysis was invoked. The viscoelastic fluid is assumed to obey the Walters’ B fluid model for which base flow velocity profiles were fortunately avail...

Electron-scale surface waves are shown to be unstable in the transverse plane of a sheared flow in an initially unmagnetized collisionless plasma, not captured by (magneto)hydrodynamics. It is found that these unstable modes have a higher growth rate than the closely related electron-scale Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in relativistic shears. Multidimensional particle-in-cell simulations verify ...

It is shown that a slender elastic fiber moving in a Stokesian fluid can be susceptible to a buckling instability--termed the "stretch-coil" instability--when moving in the neighborhood of a hyperbolic stagnation point of the flow. When the stagnation point is part of an extended cellular flow, it is found that immersed fibers can move as random walkers across time-independent closed-streamline...

A new method for the simulation of 2D viscoelastic flow is presented. Numerical stability is obtained by the logarithmic-conformation change of variable, and a fully-implicit pure-streamfunction flow formulation, without use of any artificial diffusion. As opposed to other simulation results, our calculations predict a hydrodynamic instability in the 4:1 contraction geometry at a Weissenberg nu...

In the presence of a vertically varying horizontal current (background shear), the salt-fingering instability is supplanted by the salt-sheet instability. Previous direct numerical simulation (DNS) experiments on salt sheets revealed that flow becomes turbulent via secondary instabilities. We call these instabilities zig-zag and tip modes. Here, we investigate the physics of these modes using l...

Since Rayleigh’s early work on shear-flow driven instabilities in fluids, it has been known that sheared flows are usually unstable only in the presence of an inflection point in the velocity profile. However, in magnetohydrodynamics, there are important instabilities for which no inflection point is required. In tokamak experiments, strongly sheared flows are associated with transport barriers...

Despite the importance of the magnetorotational instability (MRI) as a fundamental mechanism for angular momentum transport in magnetized accretion disks, it has yet to be demonstrated in the laboratory. A liquid sodium αω dynamo experiment at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology provides an ideal environment to study the MRI in a rotating metal annulus (Couette flow). A local stab...