A study is made of the form taken by a slender jet of water whose only boundary is a free surface. The only forces acting are inertial and gravitational. Attention is paid to the cross-flow velocity components and to the development of the shape of the cross-section of the jet as it progresses. It is established that a jet with initially elliptic cross-sections can remain elliptical, and the variation in the aspect ratio along the jet is determined.

A circular cylinder is held vertically and withdrawn from a large bath of liquid. When the horizontal end face of the cylinder rises above the mean undisturbed liquid level, an axially symmetrical meniscus is formed, which joins the cylinder at the circumference of the end. If the cylinder is further withdrawn, at a certain height the meniscus breaks. By means of the calculus of variations the condition for stability is derived in terms of the increase in height and the increase in the angle between the tangent to the meniscus and the face of the cylinder at the point where the meniscus joins it. The meniscus is unstable as long as these changes are of the same sign.

The rolling motion of a sphere on a smooth plane boundary in a simple-harmonic water motion has been analytically and experimentally investigated. For spheres having specific gravities ranging from 0·09 to 15·18 the sphere motion was found to be sinusoidal for both low and high values of the period parameter defined by Keulegan & Carpenter. The knowledge of the sphere motion, and hence the resultant force, allowed the determination of inertia and drag coefficients from Fourier-averaging techniques. Experiments in the inertial range yielded an added-mass coefficient of 1·2, compared with 0·67 from inviscid theory for translating spheres. For values of the period parameter greater than 30 the drag coefficient is reported to be approximately 0·74.

Attenuation of a plane shock due to the interaction with a single slit is examined via spark schlieren photography for shock Mach numbers between 1·17 and 2·44 and slit widths between 0·173 and 3·175 cm. Wave speed measurements by piezoelectric transducers indicate that the attenuation is weak and adequately predicted by Whitham's ray-shock theory. The slit width is observed to produce only a secondary effect on the shock attenuation rate. Stability of the attenuating shock is demonstrated from a wave diagram constructed by the ray-shock technique.

The flow of an incompressible fluid through a curved wire-gauze screen of arbitrary shape is reconsidered. Some inconsistencies in previously published papers are indicated and the various approximations and linearizations (some of which are necessary for a complete analytic solution) are discussed and their inadequacies demonstrated. Attention is concentrated on the common practical problem of calculating the screen shape required to produce a linear shear flow and experimental work is presented which supports the contention that the theoretical solutions proposed by Elder (1959)–subsequently discussed by Turner (1969) and Livesey & Laws (1973)-and Lau & Baines (1968) are inadequate, although, for the case of small shear, Elder's theory appears to be satisfactory. Since, in addition, there are inevitable difficulties concerning both the value of the deflexion coefficient appropriate to any particular screen and inhomogeneities in the screen itself, it is concluded that the preparation of a curved screen to produce the commonly required moderate to large linear shear flow is bound to be somewhat empirical and should be attempted with caution.

This paper discusses the theory of the generation of sound which occurs when a frozen turbulent eddy is convected in a mean flow past an airfoil or a semi-infinite plate, with and without the application of a Kutta condition and with and without the presence of a mean vortex sheet in the wake. A sequence of two-dimensional mathematical problems involving a prototype eddy in the form of a line vortex is examined, it being argued that this constitutes the simplest realistic model. Important effects of convection are deduced which hitherto have not been revealed by analyses which assume quadrupole sources to be at rest relative to the plate or airfoil. It is concluded that, to the order of approximation to which the sound from convected turbulence near a scattering body is usually estimated, the imposition of a Kutta condition at the trailing edge leads to a complete cancellation of the sound generated when frozen turbulence convects past a semi-infinite plate, and to the cancellation of the diffraction field produced by the trailing edge in the case of an airfoil of compact chord.

This paper experimentally investigates the heat transport and structure of convection in a high Prandtl number fluid layer whose viscosity varies by up to a factor of 300 between the boundary temperatures. An appropriate definition of the Rayleigh number R uses the viscosity at the average of the top and bottom boundary temperatures. With rigid boundaries and heating from below, the Nusselt number N normalized with the Nusselt number N0 of a constant-viscosity fluid decreases slightly as the viscosity ratio increases. The drop is 12% at a variation of 300. A slight dependence of N/N0 on R is consistent with a decrease in the exponent in the relation N ∝ Rβ from its constant-viscosity value of 0·281 to 0·25 for R [lsim ] 5 × 104. This may be correlated with a transition from three- to two-dimensional flow. At R ∼ 105 and viscosity variation of 150, the cell structure is still dominated by the horizontal wavelength of the marginally stable state. This is true with both free and rigid upper boundaries. The flow is strongly three-dimensional with a free upper boundary, while it is nearly two-dimensional with a rigid upper boundary.

The return to isotropy of homogeneous axisymmetric turbulence at Reλ ≈ 28 is studied by means of the direct spectral simulation (DSS) technique of Orszag & Patterson (1972) and the direct-interaction approximation (DIA) of Kraichnan (1959) as implemented by Herring (1974). The results of the two methods are compared for different initial degrees of anisotropy. The general agreement between the methods is good. Most of the discrepancies can be attributed to present technical limitations in implementing both schemes. The DSS has been found to be superior for strong anisotropies, because the numerical method used for solving the DIA equations is limited in its angular resolution. For small anisotropies the angular anisotropy becomes less important and the DIA results are accurate; in this case the DIA seems to be superior as it is free from the statistical uncertainties inherent in the DSS method. With respect to a return-to-isotropy study these statistical errors are large, in particular for small anisotropies. The physical interpretation of the angular energy distribution is discussed also. The numerical results and theoretical considerations for the DIA equations show that one should retain angular moments at least up to the fourth in order to obtain accurate values of the Rotta constant at moderate anisotropies.

The lateral migration of a neutrally buoyant rigid sphere suspended in a second-order fluid is studied theoretically for unidirectional two-dimensional flows. The results demonstrate the existence of migration induced by normal stresses whenever there is a lateral variation of the shear rate in the undisturbed flow. The migration occurs in the direction of decreasing absolute shear rate, which is towards the centre-line for a plane Poiseuille flow and towards the outer cylinder wall for Couette flow. The direction of migration agrees with existing experimental data for a viscoelastic suspending fluid, and qualitative agreement is found between the theoretically predicted and experimentally measured sphere trajectories.

When an interface between two fluids moves in contact with a solid boundary, the Navier-Stokes equations and the no-slip boundary condition provide an unsatisfactory theoretical model, because they predict an undefined velocity at the contact line and a non-integrable stress on the solid boundary. If the surface irregularities are included in the model, the flow on a length scale large compared with their size can be calculated, using a slip coefficient and treating the surface as smooth.

A simple type of corrugated surface is examined, and the effective slip coefficient calculated, for grooves of finite and infinite depth. The slip coefficient when the grooves are filled with one fluid and another fluid flows over them is also calculated. It is suggested that, when a fluid displaces another on a rough surface, the displaced fluid remains in the hollows on the surface, thus providing a partly fluid boundary for the displacing fluid and leading to a slip coefficient for the flow.

Fluid contained between two vertical plates and rising between them provides a simple example of a flow for which the solution can be found with and without a slip coefficient. With slip present, the force on the plates is finite and its value is calculated.

The double-boundary-layer theory of Stuart (1963, 1966) and Riley (1965, 1967) is employed to investigate the mass transport velocity due to two-dimensional standing waves in a system comprising two homogeneous fluids of different densities and viscosities. The most important double-boundary-layer structure occurs in the neighbourhood of the oscillating interface, and the possible existence of jet-like motions is envisaged at nodal positions, owing to the nature of the mean flows in the layers. In practice, the magnitude of the mass transport velocity can be a significant fraction of that of the primary, oscillatory velocity.