Annular electroconvection with shear

Abstract

We report experiments on convection driven by a radial electrical force in suspended annular smectic A liquid crystal films. In the absence of an externally imposed azimuthal shear, a stationary one-dimensional (1D) pattern consisting of symmetric vortex pairs is formed via a supercritical transition at the onset of convection. Shearing reduces the symmetries of the base state and produces a traveling 1D pattern whose basic periodic unit is a pair of asymmetric vortices. For a sufficiently large shear, the primary bifurcation changes from supercritical to subcritical. We describe measurements of the resulting hysteresis as a function of the shear at radius ratio $\eta \sim 0.8$. This simple pattern forming system has an unusual combination of symmetries and control parameters and should be amenable to quantitative theoretical analysis.

12 preprint pages, 3 figures in 2 parts each. For more info, see http://mobydick.physics.utoronto.ca

References in corpus (1)

• Weakly Nonlinear Analysis of Electroconvection in a Suspended Fluid Film

Cited by in corpus (10)

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• Three-dimensional Electro-convective Vortices in Cross-flow
• Electrically driven convection in a thin annular film undergoing circular Couette flow
• Charge Transport Scalings in Turbulent Electroconvection
• Bifurcations in annular electroconvection with an imposed shear
• Sequential Bifurcations in Sheared Annular Electroconvection
• Pattern formation in annular convection
• Codimension-two points in annular electroconvection as a function of aspect ratio
• On some electroconvection models
• Electroconvection of Thin Liquid Crystals: Model Reduction and Numerical Simulations