Interfacial wave behavior in oil-water channel flows: Prospects for a general understanding

Oil-water pressure driven channel flow is examined as a model for general two-layer flows where interfacial disturbances are important. The goal is to develop sufficient understanding of this system so that the utility and limitations of linear and nonlinear theories can be known a priori. Experiments show that sometimes linear stability is useful at predicting the steady or dominant evolving waves. However in other situations there is no agreement between the linearly fastest growing wave and the spectral peak. An interesting preliminary result is that the bifurcation to interfacial waves is supercritical for all conditions that were studied for an oil-water channel flow, gas-liquid channel flow and two-liquid Couette flow. However, three different mechanisms are dominant for each of these three situations.