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Fluid Dynamics Seminar

Monday, Feb 9, 2009, 4:00 PM
Cullimore Lecture Hall, Room 611
New Jersey Institute of Technology

Accelerating wall flows: A comparison between exact solutions and Navier-Stokes computations in bounded domains

Leo Espin

Department of Mathematical Sciences, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Abstract

We investigate the effects that different boundary conditions have in the development of the solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations in a two-dimensional, finite channel with accelerating or decelerating walls. When the channel is infinite, the Navier-Stokes equations admit solutions of the similarity form, which as previous studies have shown, may or may not be recovered depending on the form of the conditions imposed at the edge of the domain. We find that even in the case when self-similar profiles are prescribed as boundary conditions, the Navier-Stokes equations admit solutions with a different bifurcation structure from the one expected from the self-similar model.