The singularity of the Ekman layer at the equator of a rotating gravitating sphere makes it difficult to satisfy a prescribed stress boundary condition at the surface of a layer of liquid on the sphere. The equations of motion are investigated for a homogeneous ocean with vertical and lateral eddy viscosities. The horizontal Coriolis terms are not neglected. A linear equation for the boundary layer is obtained and a solution of the equation for the boundary-layer part of the velocity field is found in closed form. This is valid in a parameter range which includes the previous solutions of Stewartson and Gill as limiting cases.

A free-streamline theory is presented for the separated flow past two-dimensional bluff bodies attached to a long plane wall on which a turbulent boundary layer has developed. The non-uniform velocity profile in the turbulent boundary layer which would be measured if the bluff bodies were absent has been replaced by a hypothetical inviscid parallel shear flow which has a constant vorticity. This model admits analytical solutions and automatically yields closed streamlines in front of the bluff bodies such as the normal plate and the semicircular projection, which are geometrically very similar to observed front separation bubbles. The present theory involves three or four parameters which must be determined on the basis of experimental information, the number of parameters depending upon the shape of bluff bodies. Two typical examples of bluff bodies, i.e. the normal plate and the semicircular projection, are worked out. Pressure distributions around these bodies predicted by the present theory are found to give a good agreement with experimental measurements.

Slow motion of a thin plate at a finite angle of attack in a rotating container filled with a viscous incompressible fluid is analysed. The Rossby and Ekman numbers are assumed to be small. The solution method is developed by studying horizontal translation of an elliptical plate. The plate is shown to carry a stagnant Taylor column with it as it moves. Detailed analysis of the structure of the vertical shear column bounding the Taylor column is circumvented by integrating the equations of motion across the shear column. A jump condition based upon mass conservation in the shear column which relates the geostrophic regions inside and outside the Taylor column results. This jump condition and its method of derivation can be used to analyse arbitrary (slow) motion of any thin plate at any angle of attack.

The fluid motion resulting when a disk moves using all six degrees of freedom at an infinitesimal angle of attack is discussed. The forces and moments on the disk are calculated and the streamlines of the geostrophic flow are displayed.

This paper describes the behaviour of large amplitude, long gravity waves as they move over a horizontal bed into a region where the flow is steady but sheared in a vertical direction. A new class of exact solutions to the nonlinear hydraulic flow equations is derived. These solutions describe progressing waves and are sufficiently general to allow both the shape of the free surface at any instant and the shear profile of the undisturbed flow to be specified. The waves are examples of neutrally stable disturbances in the sense that they neither grow nor decay in amplitude, although, like simple waves on an unsheared flow, they can break.

A class of similarity solutions is derived for the equations of simple waves on inviscid shear flows discovered by Blythe, Kazakia & Varley (1972). Such solutions all have propagation speeds proportional to the square root of the depth and contain the uniform flow solution as a special case.

A finite-difference technique for the numerical calculation of two-dimensional stratified incompressible fluid flows is presented. Small density variations are not assumed, so that this method is generally applicable to a wide variety of problems. To illustrate this new technique a calculation has been made of the collapse of a uniformly mixed region in a linearly stratified fluid. In addition to giving excellent agreement with experimental data, the calculations also reveal the mechanism for an observed change in scaling behaviour.

The axial and transverse wave motions of an inviscid perfect gas in isothermal solid-body rotation in a cylinder are investigated. Solutions of the resulting eigenvalue problem are shown to correspond to two types of waves. The acoustic waves are the rotational counterparts of the well-known Rayleigh solutions for a gas at rest in a cylinder. The rotational waves, whose amplitudes and frequencies go to zero in the non-rotating limit, exhibit phase speeds both larger and smaller than the speed of sound. The effect of rotation on the frequency and structure of these waves is discussed.

The test-field model for isotropic turbulence is restated in a form which is independent of the choice of orthogonal basis functions for representing the velocity field. The model is then extended to non-stationary inhomogeneous turbulence with a mean shearing velocity, contained by boundaries of arbitrary shape. A modification of the model is introduced which makes negligible changes in the numerical predictions but which greatly simplifies computations when the co-variance matrix and related statistical matrices are non-diagonal. The altered model may be regarded as a kind of generalization of Orszag's eddy-damped Markovian model, with the damping factors determined systematically, in representation-independent form, from dynamical equations. The final equations of the test-field model are presented in a sufficiently explicit form to serve as a starting point for numerical work. To facilitate comparison, the corresponding direct-interaction equations for inhomogeneous turbulence with mean shear are presented also, in a uniform notation. The test-field model is much faster to compute than the direct-interaction approximation because, in the former, only single-time statistical functions need be computed. This advantage is at the cost of a less rich and less faithful representation of the dynamics.

It is shown that the equilibrium shape of an incompressible dielectric fluid drop rotating with constant angular velocity in the presence of a uniform external electric field of appropriate magnitude along the axis of rotation is spherical. For an inviscid fluid drop, the stability of this spherical configuration to small deformations is investigated by means of Chandrasekhar's virial method. We find that a rotating drop in the presence of an electric field parallel to the axis of rotation is, in some respects, more stable than when either only the electric field or only rotation is present. This is due to the fact that the application of an electric field parallel to the axis of a rotating drop, or of rotation parallel to an electric field in which a drop is immersed, shifts the instability mechanism to another normal mode.

The theory of concentrated two-phase mixtures developed in the previous parts of this paper is applied to analysis of the structure of the local random motion (pseudo-turbulence) occurring in flows of suspensions of small solid spheres. Suspensions under study are assumed to be locally homogeneous in the sense that large-scale agglomerates of many particles or voids filled with the pure liquid do not arise in their flows and particles can be approximately regarded as statistically independent units.

Coefficients of the particle diffusion caused by pseudo-turbulence are calculated without restrictions imposed on the value of the Reynolds number Re characterizing the fluid flow around one particle. Other pseudo-turbulent quantities (the r.m.s. pseudo-turbulent velocities of both phases, their effective pseudo-turbulent viscosities in a shear flow, etc.) are considered for small Re. In particular, a natural explanation is given to the known effect of the reduced hydraulic resistance of a fluidized bed as compared with that of a stationary particulate bed of the same porosity.

Additionally, some properties of the mean motion of a suspension influenced by pseudo-turbulence are discussed brifly. By way of example, two problems are considered: stability of the upward flow of a homogeneous suspension with respect to small perturbations depending upon the vertical co-ordinate and time, and the spatial distribution of particles suspended by the upward flow of a fluid under gravity.

An experimental study of asymptotic sink-flow turbulent boundary layers is reported. Three levels of acceleration corresponding to values of the acceleration parameter K of 1·5 × 10−6, 2·5 × 10×6 and 3·0 × 10×6 have been examined. In addition to mean velocity profiles, measurements have been obtained of the profiles of longitudinal turbulence intensity, and, for the lowest value of K, of the lateral and transverse components as well. Measurements at selected positions in the boundary layer of the power spectral density indicate that none of the boundary layers exhibit an inertial subrange; for the steepest acceleration, in particular, throughout the boundary layer the spectrum shapes are similar in form to those reported within the viscous sublayer of a high Reynolds number turbulent flow.

A layer of fluid containing gradients of both temperature and salinity is subject to several instabilities of geophysical interest. When the salinity and temperature increase upwards, the layer may become unstable even if the density profile indicates stability. This ‘doubly diffusive’ instability, first treated by Stern, is seen experimentally to consist of thin fingers of up- and downgoing fluid. Linear analysis cannot explain this small horizontal scale for a steady-state process, but a nonlinear treatment of the problem combined with a stability analysis indicates that only small-scale motions are stable when the salinity gradient is larger than that necessary for the onset of instability. In the limit of small salt diffusivity the flux of salt is calculated using the Galerkin technique and found to reach a maximum at a wavelength that decreases with increasing salinity and temperature gradients. The stability of the finite amplitude solutions is treated; only small-scale motions are found to be stable and the wavelength of the most stable mode is found to compare favourably with the wavelength that maximizes the salt flux.

Two rigid spheres of radii a and b are immersed in infinite fluid whose velocity at infinity is a linear function of position. No external force or couple acts on the spheres, and the effect of inertia forces on the motion of the fluid and the spheres is neglected. The purpose of the paper is to provide a systematic and explicit description of those aspects of the interaction between the two spheres that are relevant in a calculation of the mean stress in a suspension of spherical particles subjected to bulk deformation. The most relevant aspects are the relative velocity of the two sphere centres (V) and the force dipole strengths of the two spheres (S′ij, S″ij), as functions of the vector r separating the two centres.

It is shown that V, S′ij and S″ij depend linearly on the rate of strain at infinity and can be represented in terms of several scalar parameters which are functions of r/a and b/a alone. These scalar functions provide a framework for the expression of the many results previously obtained for particular linear ambient flows or for particular values of r/a or of b/a. Some new results are established for the asymptotic forms of the functions both for r/(a + b) [Gt ] 1 and for values of r − (a + b) small compared with a and b. A reasonably complete numerical description of the interaction of two rigid spheres of equal size is assembled, the main deficiency being accurate values of the scalar functions describing the force dipole strength of a sphere in the intermediate range of sphere separations.

In the case of steady simple shearing motion at infinity, some of the trajectories of one sphere centre relative to another are closed, a fact which has consequences for the rheological problem. These closed forms are described analytically, and also numerically in the case b/a = 1.