Three-dimensional centrifugal-type instabilities of two-dimensional flows in rotating systems

Abstract

This paper deals with the stability of incompressible inviscid planar basic flows in a rotating frame. We give a sufficient condition for such flows to undergo three-dimensional shortwave centrifugal-type instabilities. This criterion reduces to the Bradshaw–Richardson (1969) or Pedley (1969) criterion in the specific case of parallel shear flows subject to rotation, to Rayleigh’s centrifugal criterion (1916) in the case of axisymmetric vortices in inertial frames, to the Kloosterziel and van Heijst (1991) criterion in the case of axisymmetric vortices subject to rotation and to Bayly’s criterion (1988) in the case of general two-dimensional flows in inertial frames. The criterion states that a steady 2D basic flow subject to rotation Ω is unstable if there exists a streamline for which at each point 2(V/R+Ω)(W+2Ω)<0 where W is the vorticity of the streamline, ℛ is the local algebraic radius of curvature of the streamline and V is the local norm of the velocity. If this condition is satisfied then the flow is unstable according to the geometrical optics method introduced by Lifschitz and Hameiri (1991), which consists in following wave packets along the flow trajectories using a Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin formalism. When the streamlines are closed, it is further shown that a localized unstable normal mode can be constructed in the vicinity of a streamline. As an application, this new criterion is used to study the centrifugal-type instabilities in the Stuart vortices, which is a family of exact solutions describing a row of periodic co-rotating eddies. For each solution of that family and for each rotation parameter f=2Ω, we give the unstable streamline interval, according to the criterion of instability. This criterion gives only a sufficient condition of centrifugal instability. The equations of the geometrical optics method are therefore numerically solved to obtain the true centrifugally unstable streamline intervals. It turns out that our criterion gives excellent results for highly concentrated vortices, i.e., the two approaches yield the same unstable streamline intervals. In less concentrated vortices, some streamlines undergo centrifugal instability although our criterion is not fulfilled. From these numerical results, another criterion of centrifugal instability for a flow with closed streamlines is conjectured which reduces to the change of sign of the absolute vorticity W+2Ω somewhere in the flow.