The interactions between electrical tractions at the interface of a liquid jet and instability phenomena are studied with emphasis on effects due to interfacial charge relaxation. Charge relaxation causes the oscillatory growth of a perturbation. When viscous effects are small, small fields tend to decrease the growth rate of the axisymmetric mode, up to a point, and precipitate instability of the non-axisymmetric modes. Still larger field strengths increase the growth rates of asymmetric as well as axisymmetric modes. Instabilities characterized by highfrequency oscillations appear to persist even though the charge relaxation phenomena may be quite rapid. When, on the other hand, viscous effects predominate the only unstable disturbance form is the axisymmetric one, although the manner of growth may be oscillatory.

In the theory of steady stratified rotating fluid motions developed by Barcilon & Pedlosky (1967) (hereafter referred to as B & P) for flows within a circular, cylindrical container it was asserted that the innermost boundary layer on the vertical side wall was absent to lowest order when the side wall is thermally insulated. That is to say, the buoyancy layer is not required to close the vertical mass flux. This result has been disputed in a recent note by Harrington & Johnson (1969) (hereafter referred to as H & J). It is the purpose of this note to reiterate the earlier result of B & P and to show that H & J is in error. Further the result is placed on firmer ground by using the fundamental dynamical characteristics of the inviscid interior and viscous boundary layers and by avoiding the algebraic snares of manipulating Fourier series.

Stability curves are computed for both spatially and temporally growing disturbances in a stratified mixing layer between two uniform streams. The low Froude number limit, in which the effects of buoyancy predominate, and the high Froude number limit, in which the effects of density variation are manifested by the inertial terms of the vorticity equation, are considered as limiting cases. For the buoyant case, although the spatial growth rates can be predicted reasonably well by suitable use of the results for temporal growth, spatially growing disturbances appear to have high group velocities near the lower cutoff wave-number. For the inertial case, it is demonstrated that density variations can be destabilizing. More precisely, when the stream with the higher velocity has the lower density, both the wave-number range of unstable disturbances and the maximum spatial growth rate are increased relative to the case of homogeneous flow. Finally, it is shown how the growth rate of the most unstable wave in the inertial case diminishes as buoyancy becomes important.

High-speed digital computing methods are applied to the study of the statistical behaviour of turbulent velocity derivatives in a nearly isotropic turbulent field downstream of a grid. Higher-order correlations of turbulent velocity gradients, up to the eighth order, are measured. Contrary to the case of velocities, the higher even-order correlations of velocity gradients more clearly evidence the departure from a two-dimensional Gaussian probability distribution. Using non-Gaussian probability distribution laws the relations between different odd-and even-order correlations are obtained and compared with the experimental measurements. The conditions of similarity and isotropy are evaluated for the small-scale structure as evidenced by the behaviour of the turbulent velocity gradients. The concept of intermittency of the small-scale structure is also discussed.