Stability and Transition in Shear Flows

The field of hydrodynamic stability has a long history, going back to Rey­ nolds and Lord Rayleigh in the late 19th century. Because of its central role in many research efforts involving fluid flow, stability theory has grown into a mature discipline, firmly based on a large body of knowledge and a vast body of literature. The sheer size of this field has made it difficult for young researchers to access this exciting area of fluid dynamics. For this reason, writing a book on the subject of hydrodynamic stability theory and transition is a daunting endeavor, especially as any book on stability theory will have to follow into the footsteps of the classical treatises by Lin (1955), Betchov & Criminale (1967), Joseph (1971), and Drazin & Reid (1981). Each of these books has marked an important development in stability theory and has laid the foundation for many researchers to advance our understanding of stability and transition in shear flows.

1 Introduction and General Results.- 1.1 Introduction.- 1.2 Nonlinear Disturbance Equations.- 1.3 Definition of Stability and Critical Reynolds Numbers.- 1.4 The Reynolds-Orr Equation.- I Temporal Stability of Parallel Shear Flows.- 2 Linear Inviscid Analysis.- 3 Eigensolutions to the Viscous Problem.- 4 The Viscous Initial Value Problem.- 5 Nonlinear Stability.- II Stability of Complex Flows and Transition.- 6 Temporal Stability of Complex Flows.- 7 Growth of Disturbances in Space.- 8 Secondary Instability.- 9 Transition to Turbulence.- III Appendix.- A Numerical Issues and Computer Programs.- A.1 Global versus Local Methods.- A.2 Runge-Kutta Methods.- A.3 Chebyshev Expansions.- A.4 Infinite Domain and Continuous Spectrum.- A.5 Chebyshev Discretization of the Orr-Sommerfeld Equation.- A.6 MATLAB Codes for Hydrodynamic Stability Calculations.- A.7 Eigenvalues of Parallel Shear Flows.- B Resonances and Degeneracies.- B.1 Resonances and Degeneracies.- B.2 Orr-Sommerfeld-Squire Resonance.- C Adjoint of the Linearized Boundary Layer Equation.- C.1 Adjoint of the Linearized Boundary Layer Equation.- D Selected Problems on Part I.