This study continues the work of Forbes (1986) on periodic waves beneath an elastic sheet floating on the surface of an infinitely deep fluid. The solution is sought as a Fourier series with coefficients that are computed numerically. Waves of extremely large amplitude are found to exist, and results are presented for waves belonging to several different nonlinear solution branches, characterized by different numbers of inflexion points in the wave profiles. The existence of multiple solutions, conjectured in the previous paper (Forbes 1986), is confirmed here by direct numerical computation.

Transport of soluble material is analysed for volume-cycled oscillatory flow in a curved tube. The equations of motion are solved using a regular perturbation method for small ratio of tube radius to radius of curvature and order unity amplitude over a range of the Womersley parameter. The transport equation is similarly solved by a regular perturbation scheme where uniform steady end concentrations and no wall flux are assumed. The time-average axial transport of solute is calculated. There is substantial modification of transport compared to the straight-tube case and the results are interpreted with respect to pulmonary gas exchange.

Detailed mean flow and turbulence measurements have been made in a low-speed turbulent boundary layer in zero pressure gradient with an isolated, artificially generated vortex pair imbedded in it. The vortices, generated by two half-delta wings on the floor of the wind-tunnel settling chamber, rotate in opposite directions such that the ‘common flow’ between the vortices is away from the surface, and the vortex pair draws boundary-layer fluid upwards. The distance of the vortex cores above the surface grows downstream, and is roughly twice the local boundary-layer thickness. The cancellation of circulation by mixing of fluid from the two vortices is slow, and the vortices are identifiable down the full length of the test section. As in the case of the single vortex investigated in Part 1 of this series, large changes in structural parameters of the turbulence occur.

The onset of a buoyancy-driven instability during the directional solidification of a pure liquid with a strongly temperature-dependent viscosity and an arbitrary Prandtl number is investigated using linear stability theory. The Rayleigh number for this system contains the lengthscale Ls defined as the ratio of the thermal diffusivity of the liquid and the solidification velocity times the density ratio of the two phases. It is independent of the actual depth of the liquid and it reflects the fact that increasing the solidification velocity stabilizes the system. The theory also shows that the difference in material properties between the two phases and the properties of the solidifying interface itself cause the interface to look like a boundary of finite conductivity measured by a wavenumber-dependent Biot number. For large viscosity variations, convection occurs below a stagnant layer which forms just beneath the interface where the liquid is immobilized by its very large viscosity. The thickness of this layer is measured by the natural logarithm of the viscosity contrast in the liquid times the lengthscale Ls. In this limit, the influence of the solidifying boundary is shielded from the bulk liquid by the stagnant layer and so the effect of the Biot number on the critical Rayleigh number is small. However, inertial effects, being associated with the bulk liquid, are very important for small Prandtl numbers of the fluid far from the interface. The model has applications to the solidification of magma chambers or lava lakes and to the material processing of polymeric liquids.

The stability of an S-shaped, cubic temperature profile, maintained by internal heating, is considered as a model for circumstances in which an unstably stratified layer of fluid is bounded by two stable layers. Critical Rayleigh numbers are computed for the cases of an infinitely deep layer, and for a layer of finite depth with symmetrically placed free or rigid boundaries. It is found that the introduction of boundaries can reduce the stability of the system. A weakly nonlinear analysis shows that the bifurcation is supercritical and that rolls are preferred to squares for all values of the Prandtl number. This result prompts a re-examination of the model of penetrative convection in water above ice, in which the bifurcation is subcritical, in order to understand the difference between the two models.

At least four wavy instabilities are found numerically by analysing the linear stability of Taylor-vortex flow (TVF) in the limit of a small gap between two concentric cylinders which rotate differentially in the same direction. Two of the wavy instabilities, including the one leading to conventional wavy vortex (WVF), have the same axial wavelength as TVF at the onset of instability, while the other two are characterized by subharmonic modes with axial wavelengths twice as long as those of TVF. The two subharmonic instabilities appear to correspond to the wavy-inflow-boundary flow (WIB) and the wavy-outflow-boundary flow (WOB) observed in the experiment of Andereck, Liu & Swinney (1986). The phase velocities, measured in the rotating frame of reference, of all the wavy instabilities are non-zero at the onset except that the phase velocity of WVF vanishes in the region where the average rotation rate Ω of the cylinders is small. By using this simple bifurcation property of WVF for small Ω, time-independent finite-amplitude non-axisymmetric solution branches bifurcating from TVF are followed numerically. The most interesting findings are that some of the solution branches cross the line Ω = 0, producing three-dimensional nonlinear solutions in plane Couette flow.