Shear fronts and an experimental stratified shear flow

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The theoretical and experimental evaluation of a laboratory device for creating a controlled shear flow in a continuously stratified liquid is described. The shear is created by the movement of the end barriers of a rectangular channel. If these barriers are impulsively set into uniform shear motion, this motion propagates away in the form of a front of width travelling with uniform speed Nh/nπ, where N is the (constant) buoyancy frequency, t is time, n is the vertical modal number and his the channel depth. The shear produced has roughly twice the duration of that attainable using a tilting tube (Thorpe 1968) of similar dimensions. Shear enhancement is possible by introducing a properly designed flow contraction. If N(z) is variable, the shear profile obtained is that appropriate to the lowest internal wave mode of infinite length.

This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit: