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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
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The critical layer in pipe flow at high Reynolds number

Published:05 November 2008https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2008.0225

    Abstract

    We report the computation of a family of travelling wave solutions of pipe flow up to Re=75 000. As in all lower branch solutions, streaks and rolls feature prominently in these solutions. For large Re, these solutions develop a critical layer away from the wall. Although the solutions are linearly unstable, the two unstable eigenvalues approach 0 as Re→∞ at rates given by Re−0.41 and Re−0.87; surprisingly, the solutions become more stable as the flow becomes less viscous. The formation of the critical layer and other aspects of the Re→∞ limit could be universal to lower branch solutions of shear flows. We give implementation details of the GMRES-hookstep and Arnoldi iterations used for computing these solutions and their spectra, while pointing out the new aspects of our method.

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