The stability of supercritical Couette flow has been studied extensively, but few measurements of the velocity field of flow have been made. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) was used to measure the axial and radial velocities in a meridional plane for non-wavy and wavy Taylor–Couette flow in the annulus between a rotating inner cylinder and a fixed outer cylinder with fixed end conditions. The ...

The term bursting refers to the structural change from a strong regular spiral motion to a weaker turbulent motion which can occur at some position along a vortex. Various observations of this phenomenon have been recorded during low-speed tunnel investigations of vortex flows generated from sharp, swept back leading edges. These reveal a sudden deceleration of fluid along the vortex axis and e...

Large-scale computations of dynamically interacting vortex tubes forming filaments are performed with a view toward investigating their relationship to turbulent fluid flow. It is shown that the statistical properties of the tubes are consistent with commonly accepted observations about turbulence such as the Kolmogorov inertial range spectrum and lognormality of the vorticity distribution. A l...

Area and axial flow variations on rectilinear vortex tubes are considered. The state of the flow is characterized by two dependent variables, a core area, and an azimuthal circulation per unit length, which vary in time and in distance along the length of the tube. Nonlinear integrodifferential equations of motion for these variables are derived by taking certain integrals of the vorticity tran...

An axisymmetric vortex-sheet model is applied to simulate an experiment of Didden (1979) in which a moving piston forces fluid from a circular tube, leading to the formation of a vortex ring. Comparison between simulation and experiment indicates that the model captures the basic features of the ring formation process. The computed results support the experimental finding that the ring trajecto...