Taylor–Couette Flow (Criterion)
Circular Couette flow between differentially rotating cylinders becomes unstable to toroidal Taylor vortices when a dimensionless Taylor number exceeds a critical value (~1708 in the canonical incompressible case). The simulator reports a surrogate based on gap Reynolds scaling so students can connect angular slip, viscosity, and geometry to pattern formation.
Who it's for: Undergraduates studying rotating flows and hydrodynamic instability criteria.
Key terms
- Taylor–Couette
- Taylor number
- Couette flow
- Instability
How it works
Concentric cylinders with differential rotation: a gap Reynolds number and a Taylor-number surrogate indicate when toroidal vortices (rolls) replace purely azimuthal Couette flow in this schematic.
Frequently asked questions
- Why does the cartoon show rolls even slightly below threshold?
- The drawing is illustrative; the numeric readout uses the threshold for the simplified Ta surrogate.
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