title: The critical layer in pipe flow at high Reynolds number.
abstract: We report the computation of a family of travelling wave solutions of pipe flow up to Re=75000. As in all lower branch solutions, streaks and rolls feature prominently in these solutions. For large Re, these solutions develop a critical layer away from the wall. Although the solutions are linearly unstable, the two unstable eigenvalues approach 0 as Re-->infinity at rates given by Re-0.41 and Re-0.87; surprisingly, the solutions become more stable as the flow becomes less viscous. The formation of the critical layer and other aspects of the Re-->infinity limit could be universal to lower branch solutions of shear flows. We give implementation details of the GMRES-hookstep and Arnoldi iterations used for computing these solutions and their spectra, while pointing out the new aspects of our method.
authors.affiliation: Mathematics Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. divakar@umich.edu
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Viswanath