Nonlinear evolution of secondary instabilities in boundary-layer transition (Q1261648)

The early stages of laminar-turbulent transition are investigated with the aid of the splitting of the velocity field into three components associated with a one-dimensional mean flow, a two-dimensional primary wave and a general three-dimensional disturbance. Next, the two- dimensional wave is decomposed into a basic flow component with locally fixed in time amplitude, and a perturbation. Another splitting is used for the three-dimensional wave. The main effort of the authors is to obtain ODE's and, consequently, a dynamical system reduction for the governing PDE's. To this end, Fourier expansion for the velocity, amplitude expansion for the Fourier coefficients, and spectral collocation methods are used which allow to determine amplitude growth curves and velocity profiles. The good agreement with experimental data shows that, in spite of the formal character of all asymptotic approaches used, there was a right guess at the order of various quantities. The theoretical new results in the paper are relatively few while the numerical results and their comments extend over half of the work.