(1) Laboratoire d'Ondes et Milieux Complexes (LOMC), FRE 3102, CNRS-Université du Havre, 25 rue Philippe Lebon, 76058 Le Havre Cedex, France;(2) Mechanical Engineering Department, The Petroleum Institute, PO Box, 2533 Abu Dhabi, UAE
Abstract:
We have investigated the influence of a weak radial
temperature gradient in a wide gap and large aspect ratio
Couette-Taylor system. The inner cylinder is rotating and can be
heated or cooled, the outer cylinder is at rest and immersed in a
large thermal bath. We found that a radial temperature gradient
destabilizes the Couette flow leading to a pattern of traveling
helicoidal vortices occurring only near the bottom of the system.
The size of the pattern increases as the rotation frequency of the cylinder is increased. We
have characterized the spatiotemporal properties of the pattern and we have shown that it
behaves as a wall mode found in the simulation of the
complex Ginzburg-Landau equation with homogeneous boundary
conditions.