47.27.Cn Transition to turbulence
The bifurcations in a three-dimensional incompressible, electrically conducting fluid with an external forcing of the Roberts type have been studied numerically. The corresponding flow can serve as a model for the convection in the outer core of the Earth and is realized in an ongoing laboratory experiment aimed at demonstrating a dynamo effect. The symmetry group of the problem has been determined and special attention has been paid to symmetry breaking by the bifurcations. The nonmagnetic, steady Roberts flow loses stability to a steady magnetic state, which in turn is subject to secondary bifurcations. The secondary solution branches have been traced until they end up in chaotic states.
We have studied the bifurcation structure of the incompressible two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations with a special external forcing driving an array of 8×8 counterrotating vortices. The study has been motivated by recent experiments with thin layers of electrolytes showing, among other things, the formation of large-scale spatial patterns. As the strength of the forcing or the Reynolds number is raised the original stationary vortex array becomes unstable and a complex sequence of bifurcations is observed. The bifurcations lead to several periodic branches, torus and chaotic solutions, and other stationary solutions. Most remarkable is the appearance of solutions characterized by structures on spatial scales large compared to the scale of the forcing. We also characterize the different dynamic regimes by means of tracers injected into the fluid. Stretching rates and Hausdorff dimensions of convected line elements are calculated to quantify the mixing process. It turns out that for time-periodic velocity fields the mixing can be very effective.
We have studied the bifurcations in a three-dimensional incompressible magnetofluid with periodic boundary conditions and an external forcing of the Arnold-Beltrami-Childress (ABC) type. Bifurcation-analysis techniques have been applied to explore the qualitative behavior of solution branches. Due to the symmetry of the forcing, the equations are equivariant with respect to a group of transformations isomorphic to the octahedral group, and we have paid special attention to symmetry-breaking effects. As the Reynolds number is increased, the primary nonmagnetic steady state, the ABC flow, loses its stability to a periodic magnetic state, showing the appearance of a generic dynamo effect; the critical value of the Reynolds number for the instability of the ABC flow is decreased compared to the purely hydrodynamic case. The bifurcating magnetic branch in turn is subject to secondary, symmetry-breaking bifurcations. We have traced periodic and quasi- periodic branches until they end up in chaotic states. In particular detail we have analyzed the subgroup symmetries of the bifurcating periodic branches, which are closely related to the spatial structure of the magnetic field.
We report on bifurcation studies for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in two space dimensions with periodic boundary conditions and an external forcing of the Kolmogorov type. Fourier representations of velocity and pressure have been used to approximate the original partial differential equations by a finite-dimensional system of ordinary differential equations, which then has been studied by means of bifurcation-analysis techniques. A special route into chaos observed for increasing Reynolds number or strength of the imposed forcing is described. It includes several steady states, traveling waves, modulated traveling waves, periodic and torus solutions, as well as a period-doubling cascade for a torus solution. Lyapunov exponents and Kaplan-Yorke dimensions have been calculated to characterize the chaotic branch. While studying the dynamics of the system in Fourier space, we also have transformed solutions to real space and examined the relation between the different bifurcations in Fourier space and toplogical changes of the streamline portrait. In particular, the time-dependent solutions, such as, e.g., traveling waves, torus, and chaotic solutions, have been characterized by the associated fluid-particle motion (Lagrangian dynamics).