On the instability of Taylor vortices

Abstract

It is known experimentally that laminar circular Couette flow between two concentric circular cylinders, the outer of which is fixed, becomes unstable when the speed of the inner cylinder is high enough. The flow is then replaced by a new circumferential flow with superimposed toroidal (or Taylor) vortices spaced periodically along the axis. At a higher speed still the new flow develops another instability, and is replaced by a flow in which the axially periodic vortices are simultaneously periodic travelling waves in the azimuth.In the present paper an attack is made on the problem of instability of the Taylor-vortex flow against perturbations which are periodic both in the axial and azimuthal co-ordinates and, moreover, travel with some phase velocity in the latter. Subject to a number of assumptions and approximations, which are detailed in the paper, it is found that the Taylor-vortex flow is stable against perturbations with the same axial wavelength and phase, but unstable against perturbations differing in phase by ½π. After instability the new flow no longer has planes separating neighbouring vortices, but has wavy surfaces travelling in the azimuth. This feature is in accord with much (though not all) of the experimental evidence.The critical Taylor number (proportional to the square of the speed) at which the Taylor vortices become unstable is found theoretically to be about 8% above the value for which Taylor vortices first appear. This must be compared with a value in the range 5-20% for the experiments which our work models most closely. The azimuthal wave-number given a slight preference by theory is 1, in agreement with those experiments.