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The onset of three-dimensionality in the von Kármán vortex street behind a circular cylinder is investigated by carrying out the first global, nonparallel, three-dimensional stability analysis of the periodic flow. This flow is found to become unstable at a Reynolds number of 170 by a critical, three-dimensional Floquet mode with a spanwise wavelength of 1.8 diam. The spatial structure of this mode indicates that the onset of three-dimensionality is due to a near-wake instability and not caused by a stagnation-line or a boundary-layer instability.
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Noack et al. (1993) studied this question.
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