Recent studies have brought into question the view that at sufficiently high Reynolds number turbulence is an asymptotic state. We present direct observation of the decay of turbulent states in Taylor-Couette flow with lifetimes spanning five orders of magnitude. We also show that there is a regime where Taylor-Couette flow shares many of the decay characteristics observed in other shear flows,...

Plane Couette ow perturbed by a spanwise oriented ribbon, similar to a con guration investigated experimentally at CEA-Saclay, is investigated numerically using a spectral-element code. 2D steady states are computed for the perturbed con guration; these di er from the unperturbed ows mainly by a region of counter-circulation surrounding the ribbon. The 2D steady ow loses stability to 3D eigenmo...

The Chebyshev tau method is examined in detail for a variety of eigenvalue problems arising in hydrodynamic stability studies, particularly those of Orr-Sommerfeld type. We concentrate on determining the whole of the top end of the spectrum in parameter ranges beyond those often explored. The method employing a Chebyshev representation of the fourth derivative operator, D 4, is compared with th...

We discuss in this work the validity of the theoretical solution of the nonlinear Couette flow for a granular impurity obtained in a recent work [preprint arXiv:0802.0526], in the range of large inelasticity and shear rate. We show there is a good agreement between the theoretical solution and Monte Carlo simulation data, even under these extreme conditions. We also discuss an extended theoreti...