TAYLOR VORTEX FORMATION IN AXIAL THROUGH-FLOW - LINEAR AND WEAKLY NONLINEAR-ANALYSIS

To describe the pattern formation just above the first instability of the rotating Couette-Taylor system in the presence of an externally im posed axial through-how, an amplitude equation has been derived for th e case of a stationary outer cylinder. All linear and nonlinear coeffi cients of this complex Ginzburg-Landau equation have been calculated n umerically and are expressed for a wide range of radius ratios as a fu nction of through-how strength for small Reynolds numbers. A shooting method has been used to obtain the critical properties of the system. Also, the boundary of the convectively unstable regime has been determ ined.