Study of the transition to Taylor vortex flow

Abstract

We have studied the transition from laminar to Taylor vortex flow between concentric cylinders with the inner cylinder accelerating very slowly. The apparatus employs a novel visualization system allowing a time-series representation of all the vortices in the flow to be obtained at a given instant. We find that unless a quantization condition is satisfied, the flow exhibits stochastic, time-dependent effects over a significant range of Reynolds numbers.