We present a physical explanation of turbulent bursts in the flow between concentric, rotating cylinders (Couette-Taylor flow), based on fully resolved direct numerical calculations. The bursts are a temporal oscillation between a spatially laminar flow and turbulence, discovered experimentally by Hamill et al. The onset of turbulence is shown to be due to a linear instability of the spiral flow, discovered in our calculations and since confirmed experimentally.
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Coughlin et al. (1996) studied this question.
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