Shear-dependant toroidal vortex flow

Pseudoplastic circular Couette flow in annulus is investigated. The flow viscosity is dependent on the shear rate, which directly affects the conservation equations that are solved in the present study by the spectral method in the present study. The pseudoplastic model adopted here is shown to be a suitable representative of nonlinear fluids. Unlike the previous studies, where only the square of shear rate term in the viscosity expression was considered to ease the numerical manipulations, in the present study takes the term containing the quadratic power into account. The curved streamlines of the circular Couette flow can cause a centrifugal instability leading to toroidal vortices, known as Taylor vortices. It is further found that the critical Taylor number becomes lower as the pseudoplastic effect increases. Comparison with existing measurements on pseudoplastic circular Couette flow results in good agreement.