Experimental study of rotating Hagen-Poiseuille flow discharging into a 1:8 sudden expansion

In this paper, we present experimental evidence for the five different states that result from rotating Hagen-Poiseuille flow when it discharges into a 1: 8 sudden expansion, namely: stable, convectively unstable, unstable shear layer, stable and unstable vortex breakdowns. Sanmiguel-Rojas et al. ["Three-dimensional structure of confined swirling jets at moderately large Reynolds numbers," Phys. Fluids 20, 044104 (2008)] numerically predicted four of these five states and mapped the transition from one state to another. Our main objective is to study the onset of instabilities and vortex breakdown in these states experimentally. For this purpose, we visualize the flow at the inlet of the expansion for several values of moderately large Reynolds numbers, Re, and of swirl parameters, S. We analyze the inner region of the state that corresponds to the unstable shear layer in the sudden expansion and find two different states that share the same character, although they have different non-dimensional frequencies. The first relates to an oscillating structure near the axis, which arises at a small value of the swirl parameter, as well as to a generation of vortices that move downstream. The second shows, for greater values of the swirl parameter, vortices interacting with the boundary layer located on the wall of the static container that is perpendicular to the flow direction. In addition, we find a transition from stable to unstable vortex breakdown when perturbations become absolutely unstable inside the rotating pipe flow. Therefore, the most remarkable experimental finding is a new state, namely, unstable or transient vortex breakdown that takes place for the same pair of values (Rea, Sa) at which the onset of the absolute instability curve appears and intersects the region of stable vortex breakdown. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.