Preventing transition to turbulence: a viscosity stratification does not always help

Abstract

In channel flows a step on the route to turbulence is the formation of streaks, often due to algebraic growth of disturbances. While a variation of viscosity in the gradient direction often plays a large role in laminar-turbulent transition in shear flows, we show that it has, surprisingly, little effect on the algebraic growth. Non-uniform viscosity therefore may not always work as a flow-control strategy for maintaining the flow as laminar.

9 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Travelling waves in pipe flow
• Scaling of the turbulence transition threshold in a pipe
• Retardation of the onset of yurbulence by minor viscosity contrasts

Cited by in corpus (7)

• The lift-up effect: the linear mechanism behind transition and turbulence in shear flows
• The effect of wall heating on instability of channel flow
• Linear instability of Poiseuille flows with highly non-ideal fluids
• Linear Stability Analysis for Plane-Poiseuille Flow of an Elastoviscoplastic fluid with internal microstructure
• Coriolis force-based instability of a shear-thinning microchannel flow
• Edge state modulation by mean viscosity gradients
• Perturbation symmetries in shear-thinning viscoelastic pipe flows and the Petrov-Galerkin implementation