INVISCID INSTABILITY OF THE HYPERBOLIC-TANGENT VELOCITY PROFILE – SPECTRAL “TAU” SOLUTION

Abstract

The paper presents a spectral solution of the Rayleigh equation for the case of parallel, free shear layer with the hyperbolic-tangent mean velocity profile. The expansion of the eigenfunction into the Chebyshev polynomial series allowed transformation of the differential eigenvalue problem into the general algebraic one. The standard algebraic eigenvalue problem was obtained by the use of Gary and Helgasson transformation. The results were compared with the shooting method. Although the calculations were carried out in order to validate the method, some additional study of the velocity ratio and momentum thickness influence on the temporal eigenmode growth rate was also performed.