Receptivity of the rotating disk boundary layer to traveling disturbances

Abstract

An adjoint approach is developed to undertake a receptivity study of the rotating disk boundary layer. The adjoint linearized Navier–Stokes equations are first derived in cylindrical coordinates. A receptivity formula is then formulated that specifies the response of stationary and traveling linear perturbations to an external force, including sources of momenta and mass and unsteady wall motion. Using the parallel flow approximation, in which the radial dependence of the undisturbed flow is ignored, receptivity characteristics are computed for a broad range of temporal frequencies, radial wavenumbers, azimuthal mode numbers, and Reynolds numbers. The type-I crossflow instability attains a maximum amplitude for external forces fixed near the wall-normal location of the critical layer (i.e., α¯rF+βG=ω), and the type-II Coriolis instability achieves larger amplitudes when external forces are located in the vicinity of a vanishing effective shear stress (i.e., α¯rF′+βG′=0). Sources of radial momenta fixed about these wall-normal locations establish larger-sized disturbances than equivalent-sized sources of azimuthal momenta, wall-normal momenta, and mass. At the disk surface, motion along the wall-normal direction induces a stronger receptivity response than wall motions acting along the radial and azimuthal directions. In general, the crossflow instability achieves larger-sized amplitudes than the Coriolis instability, with the peak response realized for Reynolds numbers near the critical conditions for linear instability.