Modeling transitional plane Couette flow
Abstract
The Galerkin method is used to derive a realistic model of plane Couette flow in terms of partial differential equations governing the space-time dependence of the amplitude of a few cross-stream modes. Numerical simulations show that it reproduces the globally sub-critical behavior typical of this flow. In particular, the statistics of turbulent transients at decay from turbulent to laminar flow displays striking similarities with experimental findings. © 2007 EDP Sciences/Società Italiana di Fisica/Springer-Verlag.