Laminar-turbulent boundary in plane Couette flow

Tobias M. Schneider (1) , John F. Gibson (2) , Maher Lagha (3) , Filippo de Lillo (1, 4) , Bruno Eckhardt (1)

1 Fachbereich Physik
2 Center for Nonlinear Science
3 LadHyX - Laboratoire d'hydrodynamique
4 Dipartimento di Fisica Generale and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare

We apply the iterated edge-state tracking algorithm to study the boundary between laminar and turbulent dynamics in plane Couette flow at Re=400. Perturbations that are not strong enough to become fully turbulent or weak enough to relaminarize tend toward a hyperbolic coherent structure in state space, termed the edge state, which seems to be unique up to obvious continuous shift symmetries. The results reported here show that in cases where a fixed point has only one unstable direction, such as for the lower-branch solution in plane Couette flow, the iterated edge tracking algorithm converges to this state. They also show that the choice of initial state is not critical and that essentially arbitrary initial conditions can be used to find the edge state.

Domains: Physics [physics]; Mechanics [physics]; Fluid mechanics [physics.class-ph]; Engineering Sciences [physics]; Mechanics [physics.med-ph]; Fluids mechanics [physics.class-ph]

Tobias M. Schneider, John F. Gibson, Maher Lagha, Filippo de Lillo, Bruno Eckhardt. Laminar-turbulent boundary in plane Couette flow. Physical Review E : Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics, 2008, 78 (3), pp.037301. ⟨10.1103/physreve.78.037301⟩. ⟨hal-01022806⟩