Simulating the propagation of boundary-layer disturbances by solving boundary-value and initial-value problems

Abstract

Abstract The article deals with the downstream propagation of small–amplitude disturbances of viscous incompressible laminar boundary layers, using the linearized equations for disturbance amplitudes. Two different methods are proposed. The first one solves a two-dimensional boundary-value problem, using a buffer-domain technique to mimic the outflow boundary condition. The second one solves a streamwise initial-value problem, using a spectral parabolization at each integration step. Both methods show good performance in simulating the propagation of the Tollmien–Schlichting waves and the Görtler vortices and can be applied to compute the spatial optimal disturbances.