A local instability mechanism of the Navier-Stokes flow with swirl on the no-slip flat boundary

Abstract

Using numerical simulations of the axisymmetric Navier-Stokes equations with swirl on a no-slip flat boundary, Hsu-Notsu-Yoneda [J. Fluid Mech. 2016] observed the creation of a high-vorticity region on the boundary near the axis of symmetry. In this paper, using a differential geometric approach, we prove that such flows indeed have a destabilizing effect, which is formulated in terms of a lower bound on the $L^{\infty }$-norm of derivatives of the velocity field on the boundary.