Initial development of noncircular jets leading to axis switching

This paper discusses the underlying mechanisms for the deformation of coherent structures which occurs in the initial stage of the axis switching of noncircular jets. The generalized shooting method is applied to jets with elliptic-core and equilateral-triangular-core regions of constant flow. The analysis reveals that in order to have the deformation, three requirements must be present in the behavior of the eigenmodes of noncircular jets: 1) the eigenfunctions are localized without excessive overlapping; 2) the amplification rates of the corresponding eigenmodes are comparable; and 3) sufficient phase speed difference exists between the eigenmodes. The qualitative behavior of the noncircular jets found through the numerical analysis is compared with experimental results and are in good correlation with them.