Synopses & Reviews
This book presents a systematic and unified approach to the nonlinear stability problem and transitions in the Couette-Taylor problem, by the means of analytic and constructive methods. The most "elementary" one-parameter theory is first presented with great detail. More complex situations are then analyzed (mode interactions, imperfections, non-spatially periodic patterns). The whole analysis is based on the mathematically rigorous theory of center manifold and normal forms, and symmetries are fully taken into account. These methods are very general and can be applied to other hydrodynamical instabilities, or more generally to physical problems modelled by partial differential equations. Non-mathematician readers can skip the mathematically "hard" parts of the book and still catch the ideas and results. This book is primarily intended for graduate students and researchers in fluid mechanics, and more generally for applied mathematicians and physicists who are interested in the analysis of instabilities in systems governed by partial differential equations.
Synopsis
1. 1 A paradigm About one hundred years ago, Maurice Couette, a French physicist, de- signed an apparatus consisting of two coaxial cylinders, the space between the cylinders being filled with a viscous fluid and the outer cylinder being rotated at angular velocity O2. The purpose of this experiment was, follow- ing an idea of the Austrian physicist Max Margules, to deduce the viscosity of the fluid from measurements of the torque exerted by the fluid on the inner cylinder (the fluid is assumed to adhere to the walls of the cylinders). At least when O is not too large, the fluid flow is nearly laminar and 2 the method of Couette is valuable because the torque is then proportional to 110, where II is the kinematic viscosity of the fluid. If, however, O is 2 2 increased to a very large value, the flow becomes eventually turbulent. A few years later, Arnulph Mallock designed a similar apparatus but allowed the inner cylinder to rotate with angular velocity 01, while O2 = o. The surprise was that the laminar flow, now known as the Couette flow, was not observable when 0 exceeded a certain "low" critical value Ole, even 1 though, as we shall see in Chapter II, it is a solution of the model equations for any values of 0 and O .
Synopsis
Chossat introduces the general tools used in the Center Manifold Theorem combined with symmetry and normal forms arguments.