Spatiotemporal intermittency in the torsional Couette flow between a rotating and a stationary disk

Abstract

This work is devoted to the experimental study of the transition to turbulence of a flow confined in a narrow gap between a rotating and a stationary disk. When the fluid layer thickness is of the same order of magnitude as the boundary layer depths, the azimuthal velocity axial gradient is nearly constant and this rotating disk flow tends to be a torsional Couette flow. As in the plane Couette flow or the Taylor–Couette flow, transition to turbulence occurs via the appearance of turbulent domains inside a laminar background. In the rotating disk case, the nucleation of turbulent spirals, previously called “solitary waves” in the rotating disk flow literature, is connected to the birth of structural defects in a periodic underlying roll pattern. As the rotation rate is increased, the lifetime of these turbulent structures increases until a threshold is reached where they then form permanent turbulent spirals arranged nearly periodically all around a circumference. However, since the number of these turbulent spirals decreases with the rotational frequency, the transition to a fully turbulent regime is not achieved. Thus the turbulent fraction of the pattern saturates to a value lower than 0.5. After a geometrical description of the structures, we present a statistical analysis of sizes and lifetimes of the turbulent and laminar domains in order to compare this transition to already observed spatiotemporal intermittent behavior.