Resumen de Non-linear fluid dynamics in oscillatory cylindrical cavities
Carles Panades Guinart
Even though the transition to turbulence has been studied for over a century, its complete comprehension still remains unclear even for the simplest flows and continues to be a daunting challenge for the scientific community. Among these, there is the transition from the von K\'arm\'an vortex street to turbulent wakes. The complexity of this problem poses a series of difficulties that leaves little room for manoeuvre, so other ways to tackle this question have to be sought. A reasonable option is the analysis of the instability phenomena that other flows with the same symmetry group undergo. Despite being really different, an example of such flow is the one generated in a cylindrical cavity subjected to an oscillatory shear. The purpose of the present thesis has been to provide a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that are responsible for the transition in oscillatory cylindrical cavities. Besides the potential implications of studying such systems for the transitions in wake flows, the system under consideration might be useful for any investigation involving a periodic forcing. Accurate spectral computations of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations have been combined with equivariant bifurcation and normal form theories in an attempt to achieve our goal from different, yet complementary, perspectives. The utilisation of these techniques has produced positive results in the field under consideration. The linear stability analysis has resulted in three types of different bifurcations expected by normal form theory and previous results. The evolution in time of these bifurcating modes yield the non-linear saturated states, which can be synchronous with the forcing or acquire an additional frequency (quasiperiodic). Furthermore, the exploration of regions where two synchronous modes become unstable at the same time, has provided a wide variety of novel states that are not necessarily synchronous. The description of these phenomena via bifurcation theory and dynamical systems techniques is in accordance with the numerical simulations, despite not having an absolute quantitative agreement between them. The research focused on the study of viscoelastic fluids in periodically driven cylindrical cavities is a natural extension of the main topic of this thesis. Although this part has to be considered in a preliminary stage, there are some evidences suggesting that the system is always linearly stable and the only possibility to break the basic state is via a subcritical finite-amplitude bifurcation. The transition recalls in a great deal the instabilities in Newtonian plane Couette and pipe Poiseuille, thus resulting in a much more difficult instability scenario that the one that was initially expected.
