Temporal and spatial growth of subharmonic disturbances in Falkner-Skan flows

Abstract

The transition from laminar to turbulent flow in boundary-layers occurs in three stages: onset of two-dimensional TS waves, onset of three-dimensional secondary disturbances of fundamental or subharmonic type, and onset of the turbulent regime. In free flight conditions, subharmonic disturbances are the most amplified. Recent modeling of the subharmonic disturbance as a parametric instability arising from the presence of a finite amplitude TS wave has given results in quantitative agreement with experiments conducted in a Blasius boundary-layer. The present work extends the analysis to the Falkner-Skan family of profiles, and develops a formulation for spatially growing disturbances to exactly match the experimental observations. Results show that subharmonic disturbances in Falkner-Skan flows behave similarly to those in a Blasius flow. The most noticeable effect of the pressure gradient is a decrease (favorable) or an increase (adverse) of the disturbance's growth rate. Due to the lack of experimental data, a comparison of subharmonic growth rates from theory and experiment is limited to the Blasius boundary-layer. A comparison of results from the spatial formulation with those previously obtained from a temporal formulation shows the difference to be small. A connection between disturbance growth in a separating boundary-layer profile and a free shear layer is presented. A modification of Caster's transformation from temporal to spatial growth rates for secondary disturbances is given.