Fluid mechanics in the driven cavity

This review pertains to the body of work dealing with internal recirculatin g flows generated by the motion of one or more of the containing walls. The se flows are not only technologically important, they are of great scientif ic interest because they display almost all fluid mechanical phenomena in t he simplest of geometrical settings. Thus corner eddies, longitudinal vorti ces, nonuniqueness, transition, and turbulence all occur naturally and can be studied in the same closed geometry. This facilitates the comparison of results from experiment, analysis, and computation over the whole range of Reynolds numbers. Considerable progress has been made in recent years in th e understanding of three-dimensional flows and in the study of turbulence. The use of direct numerical simulation appears very promising.