Wave speeds in wavy Taylor-vortex flow

The speed of travelling azimuthal waves on Taylor vortices in a circular Couette system (with the inner cylinder rotating and the outer cylinder at rest) has been determined in laboratory experiments conducted as a function of Reynolds number R, radius ratio of the cylinders η, average axial wavelength λ̄ , number of waves m 1 and the aspect ratio Γ (the ratio of the fluid height to the gap between the cylinders). Wave speeds have also been determined numerically for axially periodic flows in infinite-length cylinders by solving the Navier-Stokes equation with a pseudospectral technique where each Taylor-vortex pair is represented with 32 axial modes, 32 azimuthal modes (in an azimuthal angle of 2π/m 1 ) and 33 radial modes. Above the onset of wavy-vortex flow the wave speed for a given η decreases with increasing R until it reaches a plateau that persists for some range in R. In the radius-ratio range examined in our experiments we find that the wave speed in the plateau region increases monotonically from 0.14Ω at η = 0.630 to 0.45Ω at η = 0.950 (where the wave speed is expressed in terms of the rotation frequency Ω of the inner cylinder). There is a much weaker dependence of the wave speed on λ̄ , m 1 and Γ. For three sets of parameter values ( R , λ̄ , η and m 1 ) the wave speeds have been measured, extrapolated to infinite aspect ratio, and compared with the numerically computed values. For each of these three cases the agreement is within 0.1 %.