Dr. Neil Balmforth
RESEARCH INTERESTS

Stratified shear flow:

Kolmogorov flow is a simple type of shear flow with sinusoidal form. The special form of the shear flow allows quite a bit of analytical insight into this problem, which presumably led Kolmogorov to originally advocate the flow as a theoretical laboratory to study shear dynamics and the transition to turbulence. Some of the papers below record our efforts to look at the stratified version of the problem in which inverse cascade and layering play a role.

Another artifice for studying stratified shear instability is the "defect approximation" wherein sharp changes in vorticity and density are embedded within a linearly unstratified shear. The Kelvin-Helmholtz, Holmboe and Taylor-Caulfield instabilities are all captured within the defect formulation; sample movies are given below.

My collaborators in this work are Jeff Carpenter, Greg Lawrence and Yuan-Nan Young.