Transition to Turbulence

Abstract

Our knowledge of the development from the first instability of a boundary layer, described in Section 18.5, to the fully turbulent motion that ultimately results comes mainly from experimental investigations. Many of the experiments have used the vibrating ribbon technique (Section 18.5). Although this was originally introduced to investigate the relevance of the linear stability theory, it proved a useful way of controlling the boundary layer development and ensuring that the same features were to be observed repeatedly at the same place. Its use was thus extended to experiments on the essentially non-linear developments further downstream. The relationship of information so obtained to the processes in naturally occurring transition will be considered later in this section.