Direct spatial resonance in the laminar boundary layer due to a rotating-disk

Abstract. Numerical treatment of the linear stability equations is undertaken to investigate the occurrence of direct spatial resonance events in the boundary layer flow due to a rotating-disk. A spectral solution of the eigenvalue problem indicates that algebraic growth of the perturbations shows up, prior to the ampli-fication of exponentially growing instability waves. This phenomenon takes place while the flow is still in the laminar state and it also tends to persist further even if the non-parallelism is taken into account. As a result, there exists the high possibility of this instability mechanism giving rise to nonlinearity and transition, long before the unboundedly growing time-amplified waves