An equation based on the hydrodynamical equations of change is solved, analytically and numerically, for the calculation of the viscosity from the mass-flow rate of a steady, isothermal, compressible and laminar flow in a capillaiy. It is shown that by far the most dominant correction is that due to the compressibility of the fluid, computable from the equation of state. The combined correction for the acceleration of the fluid and the change of the velocity profile appears to be 1.5 times larger than the correction accepted to date.

We consider the effects of a small-amplitude, steady, streamwise vorticity field on the flow over an infinitely thin flat plate in an otherwise uniform stream. We show how the initially linear perturbation, ultimately leads to a small-amplitude but nonlinear cross-flow far downstream from the leading edge. This motion is imposed on the boundary-layer flow and eventually causes the boundary layer to separate. The streamwise velocity profiles within the boundary layer become inflexional in localized spanwise regions just upstream of the separation point. The flow in these regions is therefore susceptible to rapidly growing inviscid instabilities.

Damping and eigenfrequencies of surface capillary—gravity waves greatly depend on the boundary conditions. To the best of our knowledge, so far no direct measurement has been made of the dynamic behaviour of the contact angle at the three-phase interface (fluid—vapour—solid walls) in the presence of surface oscillation. Therefore, theoretical models of surface gravity–capillary waves involve ad hoc phenomenological assumptions as far as the behavior of the contact angle is concerned. In this paper we report a systematic experimental investigation of the static and dynamic properties of surface waves in a cylindrical container where the free surface makes a static contact angle $\theta_{\rm c} = 62^{\circ}$ with the vertical walls. The actual boundary condition relating the contact angle to the velocity of the contact line is obtained using a new stroboscopic optical method. The experimental results are compared with the theoretical expressions to be found in the literature. Two different regimes are observed: (i) a low-amplitude regime, where the contact line always remains at rest and the contact angle oscillates during the oscillation of the free surface; (ii) a higher-amplitude regime, where the contact line slides on the vertical walls. The profile, the eigenfrequency and the damping rate of the first non-axisymmetric mode of the surface gravity waves are investigated. The eigenfrequency and damping rate in regime (i) are in satisfactory agreement with the predictions of the Graham-Eagle theory (1983) of pinned-end edge conditions. The eigenfrequency and damping rate in regime (ii) show a strongly nonlinear dependence on the oscillation amplitude of the free surface. All the experimental results concerning regime (ii) can be explained in terms of the Hocking (1987 a) and Miles (1967, 1991) models of capillary damping by introducing an ‘effective’ capillary coefficient $\lambda_{\rm eft}$. This coefficient is directly obtained for the first time in our experiment from dynamic measurements on the contact line. A satisfactory agreement is found to exist between theory and experiment.

We study the acoustic behaviour of a mixture of diethyl-ether bubbles and liquid, at small volume fraction of vapour, contained in a standing-wave tube. We give experimental evidence of the effect of the liquid/vapour phase transition on the positions and amplitudes of the resonances of the tube. The effective-medium theory, which properly describes the behaviour of liquid/gas mixtures, is shown to be inadequate. We find that theoretical studies which take the effect of the phase transition into account do agree with our experimental data.

A fully nonlinear numerical method is developed to study the viscous interactions of a pair of vortex tubes rising toward a free surface. The numerical theory uses Helmholtz's decomposition to treat the irrotational and vortical components of the flow as separate nonlinearly coupled equations. The laminar interactions of a pair of vortex tubes with a clean free surface at intermediate Froude and Weber numbers and a low Reynolds number show two distinct phases. During the rise phase of the vortex pairs, instabilities lead to the formation of helical vorticity. The rotation of the helical vorticity around the primary vortex tubes causes an unsteady oscillation in the free-surface elevation. During the reconnection phase, the helical vortex sheets get narrower and attach themselves to the free surface. The normal connections of cross-axis vorticity with the free surface give whirls. The free-surface elevation is well correlated with the vortical pressure. The numerical results agree qualitatively with experimental measurements.

The spin-down of a barotropic axisymmetric vortex, such as observed in laboratory models, is examined analytically. In addition to the classical, self-similar Ekman decay due to viscous effects (Greenspan & Howard 1963), which is characterized by an azimuthal velocity profile with the position of its maximum velocity fixed and a decay time equal to the Ekman timescale. the effects of nonlinearity and a free surface are considered separately.

The Ekman circulation in the radial and vertical planes whose strength is determined by the vorticity of the overlying fluid, leads to radial advection of the azimuthal velocity. This nonlinearity results in a nonlinear kinematic wave equation for the circulation and leads to the outward/inward propagation of the position of maximum azimuthal velocity for cyclonic/anticyclonic vortices. The associated steepening of the azimuthal velocity profile may lead to a shock formation when the absolute vorticity of the initial profile is negative at a certain radius. For anticyclonic vortices having a monotonically increasing angular velocity profile this shock formation occurs at the core. For such vortices (or arbitrary cyclonic vortices) this dynamical ‘breaking’ criterion is, despite significant differences in the physics concerned, identical to Rayleigh's kinematical criterion for the onset of centrifugal instability.

For a dynamically active free-surface fluid the spin-down of a decaying vortex is prolonged by a radially dependent factor proportional to the Froude number. This conclusion holds both in a cylinder with a parabolic bottom (mimicking the shape of the free surface of a fluid in solid-body rotation) and in a flat-bottomed cylinder. In view of the constancy of background vorticity the former geometry is relevant for a comparison to geophysical f-plane vortices. The latter geometry, however, is more easily established in a laboratory experiment, but the evolution of the azimuthal velocity profile is much more complicated and depends on the initial azimuthal velocity profile in a highly convoluted way.

During the day, the shallower regions of a reservoir sidearm absorb more heat per unit volume than the deeper parts, leading to a horizontal pressure gradient that drives a circulation in the sidearm. At night, the shallow regions cool more rapidly, leading to a circulation in the opposite direction. Since the spin-up time of a typical sidearm is at least of the same order as a day, the flow within a diurnally forced sidearm is principally an inertia–buoyancy balance. In this paper, a diurnally forced sidearm is modelled by periodically forced natural convection in a triangular cavity. The periodic forcing enters the model via an internal heating/cooling term in the temperature equation. Reservoir sidearms typically have small bottom slopes and this fact can be exploited to obtain asymptotic solutions of the resulting equations. These solutions clearly demonstrate the transition from the viscous-dominated flow in the shallows to the inertia-dominated flow in the deeper parts. In the inertia-dominated region, the flow response significantly lags the forcing. Numerical solutions of the full nonlinear problem are consistent with the asymptotic solutions.

Experiments were performed to study vortex shedding behind a linearly tapered cylinder. Four cylinders were used, with taper ratios varying from 50:1 to 100:1. The cylinders were each run at four different velocities, adjusted to cover the range of laminar vortex shedding for a non-tapered cylinder. The flow was confirmed to consist of discrete shedding cells, each with a constant frequency. For a centrespan Reynolds number greater than 100, the dimensionless mean cell length was found to be a constant. Individual cell size was found to be roughly self-similar. New shedding cells were created on the ends of the cylinders, or in regions adjacent to areas not shedding. Successful scalings were found for both the cell shedding frequencies and their differences, the modulation frequencies. The modulation frequencies were found to be constant along the cylinder span. The shedding frequency Strouhal number versus Reynolds number curve was found to have a slightly steeper slope than the Strouhal number curve for a non-tapered cylinder. Vortex shedding was found to begin at a local Reynolds number of about 60, regardless of any other factors. End effects were found to be of little importance.

The vortex splits, which form the links between shedding cells, were found to be similar in some respects to those found by earlier investigators. Amplitude results suggested that the splits at different spanwise locations are temporally sequenced by an overall flow mechanism, a supposition confirmed by flow visualization. Wavelet analysis results showed that while the behaviour of the shedding frequencies in time was relatively unaffected by changing taper ratio, the behaviour of the modulation frequency in time was greatly affected. Comparisons with other experiments point out the universality of vortex splitting phenomena.

A turbulent round jet of air discharging into quiescent air was studied experimentally. Some × -wire hot-wire probes mounted on a moving shuttle were used to eliminate rectification errors due to flow reversals in the intermittent region of the jet. Moments of velocity fluctuations up to fourth order were measured to characterize turbulent transport in the jet and to evaluate current models for triple moments that occur in the Reynolds stress equations. Fourth moments were very well described in terms of second moments by the quasi-Gaussian approximation across the entire jet including the intermittent region. Profiles of third moments were found to be significantly different from earlier measurements: 〈uv2〉, 〈uw2〉 and 〈u2v〉 are found to be negative near the axis of the jet. The Basic triple moment model that included turbulent production and models for the dissipation and the return-to-isotropy part of the pressure correlations was found to be unsatisfactory. When mean-strain production and a model for rapid pressure correlations were also included, predictions were satisfactory in the fully turbulent region. The consistency of the measurements with the equations of motion was assessed: momentum flux across the jet was found to be within ±5% of the nozzle input and the integral of radial diffusive flux of turbulent kinetic energy across the jet calculated from the measured third moments was found to be close to zero.

A turbulent round jet of helium was studied experimentally using a composite probe consisting of an interference probe of the Way–Libby type and an × -probe. Simultaneous measurements of two velocity components and helium mass fraction concentration were made in the x/d range 50–120. These measurements are compared with measurements in an air jet of the same momentum flux reported in Part 1. The jet discharge Froude number was 14000 and the measurement range was in the intermediate region between the non-buoyant jet region and the plume region. The measurements are consistent with earlier studies on helium jets. The mass flux of helium across the jet is within ±10% of the nozzle input. The mean velocity field along the axis of the jet is consistent with the scaling expressed by the effective diameter but the mean concentration decay constant exhibits a density-ratio dependence. The radial profiles of mean velocity and mean concentration agree with earlier measurements, with the half-widths indicating a turbulent Schmidt number of 0.7. Significantly higher intensities of axial velocity fluctuations are observed in comparison with the air jet, while the intensities of radial and azimuthal velocity fluctuations are virtually identical with the air jet when scaled with the half-widths. Approximate budgets for the turbulent kinetic energy, scalar variance and scalar fluxes are presented. The ratio of mechanical to scalar timescales is found to be close to 1.5 across most of the jet. Current models for triple moments involving scalar fluctuations are compared with measurements. As was observed with the velocity triple moments in Part 1, the performance of the Full model that includes all terms except advection was found to be very good in the fully turbulent region of the jet.

This paper presents a closed-form solution for the inertial lift force acting on a small rigid sphere that translates parallel to a flat wall in a linear shear flow. The results provide connections between results derived by other workers for various limiting cases. An analytical form for the lift force is derived in the limit of large separations. Some new results are presented for the disturbance flow created by a small rigid sphere translating through an unbounded linear shear flow.

Using direct numerical simulation techniques we investigate transition to turbulence in a boundary-layer flow containing two large-scale counter-rotating vortices with axes aligned in the streamwise direction. The vortices are assumed to have been generated by the Görtler instability mechanism operating in boundary-layer flows over concave walls. Full, three-dimensional Navier–Stokes equations in a natural curvilinear coordinate system for a flow over concave wall are solved by a pseudospectral numerical method. The simulations are initialized with the most unstable mode of the linear stability theory for this flow with its amplitude taken from the experimental measurements of Swearingen & Blackwelder (1987). The evolution of the Görtler vortices for two different spanwise wavenumbers has been investigated. In all cases the development of strong inflexional velocity profiles is observed in both spanwise and vertical directions. The instabilities of these velocity profiles are identified as a primary mechanism of the transition process. The results indicate that the spanwise shear plays a more prominent role in the transition to turbulence than the vertical shear, in agreement with the hypothesis originally proposed by Swearingen & Blackwelder (1987). The following features of the transition, consistent with this hypothesis, were observed. Instability oscillations start in the spanwise direction and are followed later by oscillations in the vertical direction. A two-dimensional linear stability analysis predicts that the maximum growth rates of perturbations associated with the spanwise profiles are greater than those associated with the vertical profiles. Regions of high perturbation velocity correlate well with the regions of high spanwise shear and no obvious correlation with the vertical shear regions is observed. Finally, the analysis of the kinetic energy balance equation reveals that most of the perturbation energy production in the initial stages of transition occurs in the region characterized by large spanwise shear created by the action of the vortices moving low-speed fluid away from the wall. Our results are consistent qualitatively and quantitatively with other experimental, theoretical, and numerical investigations of this flow.

The transient motion of ordered suspensions of liquid drops, initially arranged on a cubic lattice, is studied as a model of suspension rheology. An asymptotic three-term expansion for the effective stress tensor of a dilute suspension of spherical drops is derived based on the Faxén law for the stresslet. Comparisons with available exact results for cubic lattices suggests that the expansion is remarkably accurate even at concentrations close to maximum packing. The behaviour of suspensions with recurrent structure evolving under the influence of a simple shear flow is investigated, and the results show that the time-averaged behaviour may differ substantially from the instantaneous behaviour. Transient normal stress differences may vanish in the mean, but make appreciable contributions to the instantaneous dynamics. The effect of particle deformation is assessed by numerically computing the motion of initially spherical drops arranged on a cubic lattice. At large times, the suspension is shown to exhibit periodic motions in which the drops oscillate about a mean shape with a phase shift which depends on the geometry of the lattice and the physical properties of the fluids. It is shown that drop deformations cause shear thinning and some type of elastic behaviour, and may lower the effective viscosity of the suspension below that corresponding to the dilute limit.

Electrophoresis in an alternating electric field is the basis for electroacoustical measurements. These measurements provide new means of investigating the electrokinetic properties of colloidal systems. In order to relate electroacoustical signals to the charge and the size of colloidal particles, an expression is required for the dynamic electrophoretic mobility of colloidal particles in a continuous fluid. In this paper, an exact analytical solution to the problem is given for an arbitrary ratio between the particle radius and the electric double-layer thickness, in the case where the electrokinetic potential of the uniformly charged particle is small and unaffected by the alternating field.

Standard approximations expressing the drag of a sphere as a function of Reynolds number are reappraised in the light of the evident requirement that drag reverses with the direction of motion. It is thereby highlighted that the relation between the drag and the velocity of a sphere is not analytic. Another, simpler example is cited to illustrate a non-analytic relation between physical properties, which is appreciated to be a common feature of hydrodynamic models that rely on the abstract notion of an infinite incompressible fluid.

Computations are presented for one-dimensional Shockwaves of diatomic nitrogen. The direct simulation Monte Carlo method (DSMC) is employed. A model which allows the use of the Sutherland viscosity model in the DSMC technique is further developed to include the modelling of rotational relaxation. This is achieved by employing a temperature-dependent expression for the rotational collision number to simulate the rate of relaxation, in contrast to earlier DSMC studies which employed a constant value for the collision number. The behaviour of the new model is first considered for rotational relaxation in a heat bath. Comparison is made with the more traditional DSMC collision model termed the variable hard sphere (VHS) model in which the viscosity has a fixed temperature exponent. These two models are then applied to a number of shock-wave cases for which experimental data exist. These have Mach numbers ranging from 1.5 to 26, yet the enthalpies involved are sufficiently low to allow omission of vibrational relaxation. It is found that both the VHS and Sutherland viscosity models give excellent agreement with the experimental data for shock-wave thickness, and for profiles of density, rotational temperature, and velocity. The most significant finding of the study is that the reciprocal shock thickness varies with the upstream temperature condition. This variation is observed in the experimental data, and is simulated numerically by employing the temperature-dependent expression for the rotational collision number.

In this paper the linear stability of the hypersonic boundary layer is considered in the local-parallel approximation. It is assumed that the Prandtl-number ½ < σ < 1 and the viscosity-temperature law is a power function: μ/μ∞ = (T/T∞)ω. The asymptotic theory in the limit M∞ → ∞ is developed.

Smith & Brown found for the Blasius base flow and Balsa & Goldstein for the mixing layer that, in this limit, the disturbances of the vorticity mode are located in the thin region between the boundary layer and the external flow. The gas model with σ = 1, ω = 1 was exploited in these studies. Here it is demonstrated that the vorticity mode also exists for gas with ½ < σ 1, ω < 1, but its structure and characteristics are considerably different. The nomenclature is discussed, i.e. what an acoustic mode and a vorticity mode are. The numerical solution of the inviscid instability problem for the vorticity mode is obtained for helium and compared with the solution of the complete Rayleigh equation at finite Mach numbers.

The limit M∞ → ∞ in the local-parallel approximation for the Blasius base flow is considered so as to understand the viscous structure of the vorticity mode. The viscous stability problem for the vorticity mode is formulated under these assumptions. The problem contains only a single similarity parameter which is a function of the Mach and Reynolds numbers, the temperature factor and wave inclination angle. This problem is numerically solved for helium. The universal upper branch of the neutral curve is obtained as a result. The asymptotic results are compared with the numerical solutions of the complete problem.

This paper discusses the long-wave limit of the asymptotic theory of hypersonic boundary-layer stability for a gas with the Prandtl number ½ < σ < 1 and with the viscosity–temperature law being a power function. The investigation is confined to the local-parallel approximation.

In the long-wave limit the vorticity mode starts to interact with the acoustic disturbances in the boundary-layer region. The general solution of the linear problem in the boundary-layer inner region is analysed numerically and analytically. This solution is matched with the long-wave vorticity-mode solution near the transition layer. As a result, the inviscid instability problem for a hypersonic boundary layer is formulated. The analytical solution of this problem is found and analysed. The different limits of the solution are considered and the universal forms of the dependence are obtained. A similarity parameter is found which is a function of the Prandtl number and the power in the viscosity–temperature law. A significant change of the solution behaviour is noticed when this parameter passes a critical value. The asymptotic structure of the amplification rate, as a function of the wavenumber, is described and discussed.

A time-stepping numerical model of uniform circular orbital flow around a cylinder provides results which are compared with the steady-state predictions of a boundary-layer solution by Riley. At small amplitudes of motion excellent agreement is found in most respects, but in the numerical model the outer recirculating flow and related components of loading do not reach a steady state after any finite time. At a Stokes parameter β of 500, the boundary-layer approach remains reasonably accurate for amplitudes of motion up to about 8 % of the cylinder diameter; for amplitudes up to twice this at the same value of β the flow remains largely attached. The strength of the outer recirculating flow is enhanced by nonlinear interactions, but the computed nonlinear loading exceeds that observed in experiments. Flow visualization shows a three-dimensional structure in the flow, and it is argued that this has an important effect on the loading that cannot yet be predicted. A computed force component at a frequency of about 30 % of that of the ambient flow is related to the retrogressive motion of vortex structures around the cylinder.

Experimental results are given for the mean and fluctuation concentration in a plume from a point source in grid-generated turbulence, which has developed so as to have a width comparable to the cylinder diameter, is disturbed by a cylinder with its axis intersecting the plume axis perpendicularly. It is shown that the disturbance effect of the cylinder appears in the upstream region of about 1.5 diameter from the stagnation point. As the stagnation point is approached, the increased travel time and the enhanced molecular diffusion cause a noticeable amplification of the dissipation of concentration variance. Also, the characteristics of some conditional statistics of the plume entrained in the wake are examined in order to investigate the intermittent structure of the plume meandering produced by the Kármán vortex street.