Spatio-temporal behavior of spiral vortex flow

Experimental realizations of Taylor-Couette flow often include rigid end plates at bottom and top of the system. As a consequence of such end plates the bifurcation behavior of the basic laminar flow as well as the spatio-temporal properties of the emerging pattern, such as e.g. spiral vortex flow, can change. The latter point is in the focus of our present experimental study. The spatio-temporal behavior of spiral vortex flow in a Taylor-Couette system with rigid end plates is analyzed by a measurement technique based on Doppler-shift. This enables us to determine the spatial amplitude profile of up- and downward propagating spiral vortices within oscillatory flow states. Our study confirms experimentally recent numerical results of Hoffmann et al. [1] on the spatio-temporal properties of the spiral vortex state in finite systems with rigid end plates