The feeding behaviour of many small, free-swimming organisms involves the creation of a scanning current by the coordinated movement of a group of appendages. In this paper, we study the generation of scanning currents in Stokes flow in a number of simple models, utilizing the movement of Stokeslets, spheres, or stalks to set up an average scanning drift in a suitable far-field formulation. Various mechanisms may then be classified by the rate of decay at infinity of the mean scanning current. In addition, optimal scanning can be investigated by minimizing the mean power-required to create a current of prescribed amplitude. The simple mechanisms for scanning described here provide a framework within which the appendage movements of small aquatic organisms can be analysed and the relative merits of scanning and swimming strategies can be investigated.

The turbulence structure in zero-pressure-gradient boundary layers above smooth, rough and wavy surfaces was investigated. The mean flow, turbulence intensity and spectral data for both smooth and rough surfaces show support for the attached eddy hypothesis of Townsend (1976), the model for wall turbulence proposed by Perry & Chong (1982) and the extended version developed by Perry, Henbest & Chong (1986). Anomalies in hot-wire behaviour when measuring in the turbulent wall region of the flow were discovered and some of these have been resolved.

Experiments on fluidization with water of spherical particles falling against gravity in columns of rectangular cross-section are described. All of them are dominated by inertial effects associated with wakes. Two local mechanisms are involved: drafting and kissing and tumbling into stable cross-stream arrays. Drafting, kissing and tumbling are rearrangement mechanisms in which one sphere is captured in the wake of the other. The kissing spheres are aligned with the stream. The streamwise alignment is massively unstable and the kissing spheres tumble into more stable cross-stream pairs of doublets which can aggregate into larger relatively stable horizontal arrays. Cross-stream arrays in beds of spheres constrained to move in two dimensions are remarkable. These arrays may even coalesce into aggregations of close-packed spheres separated by regions of clear water. A somewhat weaker form of cooperative motion of cross-stream arrays of rising spheres is found in beds of square cross-section where the spheres may move freely in three dimensions. Horizontal arrays rise where drafting spheres fall because of greater drag. Aggregation of spheres seems to be associated with relatively stable cooperative motions of horizontal arrays of spheres rising in their own wakes.

Hot-film-anemometer measurements were carried out in a shear flow between a flat plate and a moving plate fitted with an array of tall fences. The effect of spatial restriction by the fences on the inner-layer structure of the boundary layer developing on the flat-plate side was investigated. It was revealed that the inner-layer structure was maintained even when the tips of the fences were passing at a distance y+ = 45 from the flat plate; the flow did not become laminar-like until the tips reached y+ = 25. These results suggested the physical view that the inner layer of wall turbulence has a tough, self-sustaining structure, which is uniquely determined under a given mean wall shear stress and is hardly influenced by outer-layer disturbances provided that its own spatial extent of about 45 ν/u* from the wall is maintained.

An experimental investigation of flow over an axisymmetric cavity shows that self-sustained, periodic oscillations of the cavity shear layer are associated with low cavity drag. In this low-drag mode the flow regulates itself to fix the mean-shear-layer stagnation point at the downstream corner. Above a critical value of the cavity width-to-depth ratio there is an abrupt and large increase of drag due to the onset of the ‘wake mode’ of instability. It is also shown by measurement of the momentum balance how the drag of the cavity is related to the state of the shear layer, as defined by the mean momentum transport $\rho\overline{u}\overline{v}$ and the Reynolds stress $\rho\overline{u^{\prime}v^{\prime}}$, and how these are related to the amplifying oscillations in the shear layer. The cavity shear layer is found to be different, in several respects, from a free shear layer.