Instability of a homogeneous flow from a lumped source in the presence of special boundary conditions on a free surface

Abstract

In this work, experimental studies were carried out to investigate the structure of a surface flow and to understand potential mechanisms leading to the formation of this type instability. The surface flow was generated by feeding water through three sources: a lumped source with free upper boundary, a slot gap, and a lumped source for inducing a capillary-driven Marangoni flow. For flow visualization, a traditional light knife technique was used. The application of a method of spatial separation of the water volume into two isolated parts whose common surface remained unchanged and the realization of a reverse situation with a divided surface made it possible to study in detail the surface flow structure and to determine the conditions for the appearance of such hydrodynamic instability. It is shown that the formation of a vortex flow is caused by the interaction between the coordinate of the flow homogeneous along the transverse flow and the layer of a surface-active substance adsorbed at the interface. The obtained experimental results demonstrate the importance of setting different boundary conditions for potential and vortex velocity components of a convective flow in the region near the interface occupied by a surfactant.