Boundary-layer turbulence in experiments of quasi-Keplerian flows

Abstract

Most flows in nature and engineering are turbulent because of their large velocities and spatial scales. Laboratory experiments of rotating quasi-Keplerian flows, for which the angular velocity decreases radially but the angular momentum increases, are however laminar at Reynolds numbers exceeding one million. This is in apparent contradiction to direct numerical simulations showing that in these experiments turbulence transition is triggered by the axial boundaries. We here show numerically that as the Reynolds number increases turbulence becomes progressively confined to the boundary layers and the flow in the bulk fully relaminarizes. Our findings support that turbulence is unlikely to occur in isothermal constant density quasi-Keplerian flows.

16 pages, 8 figures. Accepted for publication in Journal of Fluid Mechanics

References in corpus (6)

• Hydrodynamic turbulence cannot transport angular momentum effectively in astrophysical disks
• Stability and angular-momentum transport of fluid flows between corotating cylinders
• Experimental analysis of the Strato-rotational Instability in a cylindrical Couette flow
• On the survival of zombie vortices in protoplanetary discs
• Azimuthal velocity profiles in Rayleigh-stable Taylor-Couette flow and implied axial angular momentum transport
• The Influence of Horizontal Boundaries on Ekman Circulation and Angular Momentum Transport in a Cylindrical Annulus

Cited by in corpus (15)

• The initial conditions for planet formation: Turbulence driven by hydrodynamical instabilities in disks around young stars
• Dynamo Action in a Quasi-Keplerian Taylor-Couette Flow
• Identification of a non-axisymmetric mode in laboratory experiments searching for standard magnetorotational instability
• nsCouette -- A high-performance code for direct numerical simulations of turbulent Taylor-Couette flow
• Vortex merging and splitting events in viscoelastic Taylor Couette flow
• Hydrodynamic turbulence in quasi-Keplerian rotating flows
• Taylor-Couette flow for astrophysical purposes
• Routes to turbulence in Taylor-Couette flow
• Transport properties of the Azimuthal Magnetorotational Instability
• Experiments and long-term High Performance Computations on amplitude modulations of strato-rotational flows
• Turbulence in electromagnetically-driven Keplerian flows
• Fully nonlinear mode competitions in magnetised Taylor-Couette flow
• Quasi-two-dimensional nonlinear evolution of helical magnetorotational instability in a magnetized Taylor-Couette flow
• Laboratory modeling of MHD accretion disks
• Angular Momentum Transport by Keplerian Turbulence in Liquid Metals