Thermocapillary and oscillatory-shear instabilities in a layer of liquid with a deformable surface

Abstract

The thermocapillary and shear-induced instabilities of a thin heated layer of liquid bounded from the top by a deformable free surface and at the bottom by a horizontally oscillating plate are studied for both Earth-bound and microgravity conditions. Finite-wavelength thermocapillary convection can be stabilized very significantly by the oscillatory shear, whereas shear-induced instabilities are greatly stabilized if the Marangoni number is negative. For long-wavelength thermocapillary convection, oscillatory shear can stabilize or destabilize the basic state, depending primarily on the imposed forcing frequency. With microgravity, significant stabilization of the dominant long-wavelength convection can be achieved by carefully selecting the imposed frequency.