Flow instability as a research area investigates the onset, evolution, and control of disturbances in fluid flows, focusing on the mechanisms by which small perturbations grow, saturate, or decay in laminar or transitional regimes. It encompasses linear and nonlinear stability theory, eigenvalue and transient growth analyses, secondary instabilities, and the role of inflectional profiles, shear, and buoyancy in triggering transition to turbulence. This area integrates analytical, numerical, and experimental approaches to characterize modal and non-modal instabilities, study coherent structures, and develop models and control strategies relevant to aerodynamics, turbomachinery, geophysical flows, and microfluidics, often coupling hydrodynamic stability with heat, mass, or momentum transfer phenomena.
Viscous fingering occurs when a thinner fluid pushes a thicker, more viscous fluid in a porous medium, like underground rock, creating unpredictable, finger-like patterns. For decades, this intricate dance between fluids ...
Soft Matter
Nov 11, 2025
0
1
Turbulence is everywhere, yet much about the nature of turbulence remains unknown. During the last decade, physicists have discovered how fluids in a pipe or similar geometry transition from a smooth, laminar state to a turbulent ...
General Physics
Sep 11, 2025
1
146
The collective motion of bacteria—from stable swirling patterns to chaotic turbulent flows—has intrigued scientists for decades. When a bacterial swarm is confined in small circular space, stable rotating vortices are ...
General Physics
Mar 17, 2025
0
12
Soft viscoelastic solids are flexible materials that can return to their original shape after being stretched. Due to the unique properties driving their deformation, these materials can sometimes behave and change shape ...
An altogether new convective instability has been predicted and experimentally discovered, 140 years after Lord Rayleigh. Convective instabilities are of fundamental importance for both our everyday life as well as for ecology ...
In 1883, Osborne Reynolds injected ink into water in a short, clear pipe to observe its movement. His experiments showed that as the input water velocity increased, the flow went from laminar (smooth and predictable) to turbulent ...
Soft Matter
Jun 3, 2024
0
102
When materials are subjected to extreme environments, they face the risk of mixing together. This mixing may result in hydrodynamic instabilities, yielding undesirable side effects. Such instabilities present a grand challenge ...
General Physics
May 13, 2024
0
8
To become commercially viable, fusion power plants must create and sustain the plasma conditions necessary for fusion reactions. However, at high temperatures and densities, plasmas often develop gradients in those temperatures ...
Plasma Physics
Mar 12, 2024
0
62
A research group led by Prof. Wan Yinhua from the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a novel antifouling nanofiltration membrane for various types of industrial liquid ...
Nanomaterials
Jul 27, 2022
0
3
