The effect of confinement on the stability of viscous planar jets and wakes

This theoretical study examines confined viscous planar jet/wake flows with continuous velocity profiles. These flows are characterized by the shear, confinement, Reynolds number and shear-layer thickness. The primary aim of this paper is to determine the effect of confinement on viscous jets and wakes and to compare these results with corresponding inviscid results. The secondary aim is to consider the effect of viscosity and shear-layer thickness. A spatio-temporal analysis is performed in order to determine absolute/convective instability criteria. This analysis is carried out numerically by solving the Orr-Sommerfeld equation using a Chebyshev collocation method. Results are produced over a large range of parameter space, including both co-flow and counter-flow domains and confinements corresponding to 0.1 < h(2)/h(1) <10, where the subscripts 1 and 2 refer to the inner and outer streams, respectively. The Reynolds number, which is defined using the channel width, takes values between 10 and 1000. Different velocity profiles are used so that the shear layers occupy between 1/2 and 1/24 of the channel width. Results indicate that confinement has a destabilizing effect on both inviscid and viscous flows. Viscosity is found always to be stabilizing, although its effect can safely be neglected above Re = 1000. Thick shear layers are found to have a stabilizing effect on the flow, but infinitely thin shear layers are not the most unstable; having shear layers of a small, but finite, thickness gives rise to the strongest instability.