Taylor Nearly Columnar Vortices in the Couette-Taylor System: Transition to Turbulence

The analysis of the Taylor-Couette problem in the small gap limit is extended to the of nearly columnar (NC) solutions. The theoretical results are derived in the small-gap approximation which is not always well approximated in experiments. Despite this studies in the Cartesian frame work when compared with theoretical results and observations yield good agreement. For higher values of the axial wavenumber, beta, up to beta similar to 3 rather narrow Taylor vortices may be realized for Reynolds number R<80. These vortices will become unstable to states with columnar components with increasing R. We show that for low R, (R,beta)similar to(62.2,3.5), a state with a strong columnar component drifting in stream-wise direction exists for azimuthal wavenumbers alpha similar to 0.17 with beta=3.5. We examine the bifurcation sequence of these states.