Hydrodynamic Stability of Hagen-Poiseuille (pipe) flow.

Transition to turbulence in a straight pipe of circular cross-section still remains

an unexplained phenomenon in fundamental fluid dynamics. Since the work of
Osborne Reynolds in 1883, many engineers, physicists and also
mathematicians have tried to provide an answer to the following questions:
o Since the parabolic Hagen-Poiseuille flow is linearly stable, what is the
minimum amplitude of a perturbation required to trigger transition?
o Is pipe turbulence just a transient phenomenon?.
Or:
o Are there any other attractors apart from the basic solution?
o What role do the recently found finite amplitude families of Travelling
Wave solutions (found independently by Holger Faisst, Bruno Eckhardt,
Hakan Wedin and Rich Kerswell) play in the transition process?

Subcritical transition in Taylor-Couette flow .

Since G.I. Taylor published his famous paper in 1923, the Taylor-Couette
problem (study of the behaviour of an incompressible viscous fluid contained
between two independently rotating concentric cylinders) has been one of the
most studied problems of fluid dynamics. We could see Taylor-Couette problem
as the Hydrogen Atom of fluid dynamics, where all the mathematical
formulation provided by Dynamical Systems / Bifurcation Theory applies
nicely. The ammount of literature regarding this topic is huge, from
experimental studies to numerical simulations. A lot of explorations have been
carried out and many secondary supercritical laminar flows (steady, time
periodic or almost periodic) have been identified numerically and
experimentally. Similarly to what happens in the pipe problem described above,
the circular Couette flow may exhibit subcritical transition to turbulence in the
absence of linear instabilities or local bifurcations. This phenomenon was
originally reported by Coles and Van Atta in the mid 1960's. The two works
below study in detail the transient growth of perturbations in this problem and
its possible implications in the aforementioned subcritical transition observed
by Coles:
Meseguer, A. (2002) `On nonnormal effects in the Taylor-Couette
problem', Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics, 16, 71-77, doi:
10.1007/s00162-002-0067-8. .
Meseguer, A. (2002) `Energy transient growth in the Taylor Couette
problem,' Physics of Fluids, 14 (5).

Spectral solenoidal Petrov-Galerkin schemes for

incompressible Navier-Stokes equations.
There are many methodologies of approximation of the Navier-Stokes
equations. The most used by engineers are finite differences/elements because
they are easy to implement and parallelize. Spectral methods are well known
for their unbeatable accuracy but also for their difficult formulation. Things
become a bit more complicated when working with polar coordinates, where
Navier-Stokes equations lead to an apparent singularity at the origin. Besides,
the incompressibility condition and the pressure term increase the complexity
of the spectral formulation. In these two reports we provide a spectral method
to solve Navier-Stokes equations in polar coordinates, with suitable regularity
conditions at the polar axis, incompressibility identically satisfied, and pressure
term elegantly eliminated from the formulation:
Meseguer, A., Trefethen, L. N. `A Spectral Petrov-Galerkin formulation for
pipe flow II: Nonlinear transitional stages ', Oxford University Computing
Laboratory, Tech. Rep. 01/19 (2001).
Meseguer, A. and Trefethen, L. N., `A spectral Petrov-Galerkin formulation for
pipe flow I: Linear stability and transient growth', Oxford University
Computing Laboratory, Tech. Rep. 00/18 (2000).