Advanced Fluid Mechanics - Flow Instabilities

Catalog description

Waves in fluids: surface waves, internal waves, inertial and acoustic waves, dispersion and group velocity, wave trains, transport due to waves, propagation in slowly varying medium, wave steepening, solitons and solitary waves, shock waves. Instability of fluid motion: dynamical systems, bifurcations, Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, Rayleigh-Benard convection, energy method, global stability, linear stability of parallel flows, necessary and sufficient conditions for stability, viscosity as a destabilizing factor, convective and absolute instability. Focus is on flow instabilities. Prerequisites: graduate courses in compressible and viscous flow.