Experiments on the stability of sinusoidal flow over a circular cylinder

Abstract

The instabilities in a sinusoidally oscillating non-separated flow over smooth circular cylinders in the range of Keulegan–Carpenter numbers, K, from about 0.02 to 1 and Stokes numbers, β, from about 10³ to 1.4 × 10⁶ have been observed from inception to chaos using several high-speed imagers and laser-induced fluorescence. The instabilities ranged from small quasi-coherent structures, as in Stokes flow over a flat wall (Sarpkaya 1993), to three-dimensional spanwise perturbations because of the centrifugal forces induced by the curvature of the boundary layer (Taylor–Görtler instability). These gave rise to streamwise-oriented counter-rotating vortices or mushroom-shaped coherent structures as K approached the K_h values theoretically predicted by Hall (1984). Further increases in K for a given β led first to complex interactions between the coherent structures and then to chaotic motion. The mapping of the observations led to the delineation of four states of flow in the (K, β)-plane: stable, marginal, unstable, and chaotic.