ePrints@IIScePrints@IISc Home | About | Browse | Latest Additions | Advanced Search | Contact | Help

Stochastically driven instability in rotating shear flows

Mukhopadhyay, Banibrata and Chattopadhyay, Amit K (2013) Stochastically driven instability in rotating shear flows. In: JOURNAL OF PHYSICS A-MATHEMATICAL AND THEORETICAL, 46 (3).

[img] PDF
jol_phy_mat_the_46_3_2013.pdf - Published Version
Restricted to Registered users only

Download (561kB) | Request a copy
Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1751-8113/46/3/035501

Abstract

The origin of hydrodynamic turbulence in rotating shear flows is investigated, with particular emphasis on the flows whose angular velocity decreases but whose specific angular momentum increases with the increasing radial coordinate. Such flows are Rayleigh stable, but must be turbulent in order to explain the observed data. Such a mismatch between the linear theory and the observations/experiments is more severe when any hydromagnetic/magnetohydrodynamic instability and then the corresponding turbulence therein is ruled out. This work explores the effect of stochastic noise on such hydrodynamic flows. We essentially concentrate on a small section of such a flow, which is nothing but a plane shear flow supplemented by the Coriolis effect. This also mimics a small section of an astrophysical accretion disc. It is found that such stochastically driven flows exhibit large temporal and spatial correlations of perturbation velocities and hence large energy dissipations of perturbation, which presumably generate the instability. A range of angular velocity (Omega) profiles of the background flow, starting from that of a constant specific angular momentum (lambda = Omega r(2); r being the radial coordinate) to a constant circular velocity (v(phi) = Omega r), is explored. However, all the background angular velocities exhibit identical growth and roughness exponents of their perturbations, revealing a unique universality class for the stochastically forced hydrodynamics of rotating shear flows. This work, to the best of our knowledge, is the first attempt to understand the origin of instability and turbulence in three-dimensional Rayleigh stable rotating shear flows by introducing additive noise to the underlying linearized governing equations. This has important implications to resolve the turbulence problem in astrophysical hydrodynamic flows such as accretion discs.

Item Type: Journal Article
Publication: JOURNAL OF PHYSICS A-MATHEMATICAL AND THEORETICAL
Publisher: IOP PUBLISHING LTD
Additional Information: Copyright for this article belongs to IOP PUBLISHING LTD, ENGLAND
Department/Centre: Division of Physical & Mathematical Sciences > Physics
Date Deposited: 01 Feb 2013 14:15
Last Modified: 01 Feb 2013 14:15
URI: http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/45684

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item