Abstract
How disturbances evolve in a shear flow of small viscosity has been a problem at the center of transition research from the early beginning of that field of inquiry since Rayleigh (1880) showed that for an inviscid parallel shear flow a necessary condition for an infinite wave train to grow exponentially with time is the presence of an inflection point in the shear flow. Fjørtoft (1950) was able to sharpen Rayleigh’s criterion by demonstrating that the instability occurs only for a maximum in the shear rate. Most of the investigations to date have focused on how Tollmien-Schlichting wave-like disturbances evolve in time and space. However, as Gustavsson (1981) and others have pointed out, discrete wave modes do not provide a complete description of the disturbance flow field in a boundary layer, but a continuous set must also be included which may be of increasing importance as the viscosity becomes smaller
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© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Landahl, M.T. (1996). Role of Non-Wave-Like Disturbances in Transition. In: Grue, J., Gjevik, B., Weber, J.E. (eds) Waves and Nonlinear Processes in Hydrodynamics. Fluid Mechanics and Its Applications, vol 34. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0253-4_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0253-4_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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