AbstractTaylor–Couette flow is inevitably associated with the visually appealing toroidal vortices, waves, and spirals that are instigated by linear instability. The linearly stable regimes, however, pose a new challenge: do they undergo transition to turbulence and if so, what is its mechanism? Maretzke et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 742, 2014, pp. 254–290) begin to address this question by determining the transient growth over the entire parameter space. They find that in the quasi-Keplerian regime, the optimal perturbations take the form of Taylor columns and that the maximum energy achieved depends only on the shear.
Transient Growth of Axisymmetric Perturbations in Co-rotating Taylor-couette Flow of a Bingham Fluid