TAYLOR-COUETTE FLOW AN EXPERIMENT ON VORTEX FLOW BETWEEN TWO CYLINDERS

Taylor-Couette is the flow of an incompressible fluid in the gap between two concentric cylinders and is used for varying effects to examine turbulent patterns in fluids. The Couette apparatus was developed by Maurice Couette in 1890 as a means for measuring the viscosity of a fluid at small imposed angular velocities of the cylinders. Our apparatus has a stationary outer cylinder and an inner one rotating with variable speed. Above a certain angular speed the initial rotary laminar flow becomes unstable and organizes itself into a stack of toroidal vortices (Taylor vortices). By suitably dying the water, the apparatus allows for the visualization of these vortices and the observation of their dynamical evolution with changing speed. The aim of the experiment is to compare the Critical Taylor number (i.e., the point at which the Taylor vortices just starts to develop) measured experimentally with the theoretical value and also to find flow patterns in fluids