Taylor-Couette flow
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The Taylor-Couette flow consists of a viscous fluid confined in the gap between two rotating cylinders. For low angular velocities, measured by the Reynolds number Re, the flow is steady and purely azimuthal. This laminar basic state is known as circular Couette flow, after Maurice Marie Alfred Couette who used this experimental device as a means to measure viscosity. Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor investigated the stability of the Couette flow in a ground-breaking paper which has been a cornerstone in the development of hydrodynamic instability theory [1]. He showed that when the angular velocity of the inner cylinder is increased above a certain threshold, Couette flow becomes unstable and a secondary steady state characterized by axisymmetric toroidal vortices, known as Taylor vortex flow, emerges. Subsequently increasing the angular speed of the cylinder the system undergoes a progression of instabilities which lead to states with greater spatio-temporal complexity [2].
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