Convective and absolute instabilities in counter-rotating spiral Poiseuille flow

Abstract

We present results of an experimental study on the stability of Taylor–Couette flow in case of counter-rotating cylinders and an imposed axial through flow. We are able to confirm results form recent numerical investigations done by Pinter et al. [24] by measuring the absolute and convective stability boundaries of both propagating Taylor vortices (PTV) and spiral vortices (SPI). Thus our work shows that these theoretical concepts from hydrodynamic stability in open flows apply to experimental counter-rotating Taylor–Couette systems with an imposed axial through flow.