National Physical Laboratory

About: National Physical Laboratory is a facility organization based out in London, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Dielectric & Thin film. The organization has 7615 authors who have published 13327 publications receiving 319381 citations.

On the instability of Taylor vortices

Abstract: It is known experimentally that laminar circular Couette flow between two concentric circular cylinders, the outer of which is fixed, becomes unstable when the speed of the inner cylinder is high enough. The flow is then replaced by a new circumferential flow with superimposed toroidal (or Taylor) vortices spaced periodically along the axis. At a higher speed still the new flow develops another instability, and is replaced by a flow in which the axially periodic vortices are simultaneously periodic travelling waves in the azimuth.In the present paper an attack is made on the problem of instability of the Taylor-vortex flow against perturbations which are periodic both in the axial and azimuthal co-ordinates and, moreover, travel with some phase velocity in the latter. Subject to a number of assumptions and approximations, which are detailed in the paper, it is found that the Taylor-vortex flow is stable against perturbations with the same axial wavelength and phase, but unstable against perturbations differing in phase by ½π. After instability the new flow no longer has planes separating neighbouring vortices, but has wavy surfaces travelling in the azimuth. This feature is in accord with much (though not all) of the experimental evidence.The critical Taylor number (proportional to the square of the speed) at which the Taylor vortices become unstable is found theoretically to be about 8% above the value for which Taylor vortices first appear. This must be compared with a value in the range 5-20% for the experiments which our work models most closely. The azimuthal wave-number given a slight preference by theory is 1, in agreement with those experiments.

Theory of stress transfer in a 0°—90°—0° cross-ply laminate containing a parallel array of transverse cracks

Abstract: Two new analytical methods have been developed that can predict the stress transfer between the 0 and 90° plies in a 0°—90°—0° cross-ply laminate containing transverse cracks. Account is taken of thermal residual stresses arising from a mismatch in thermal expansion coefficients of the 0 and 90° plies. The first method is based on a 2-D model which assumes that generalised plane strain conditions prevail. The theoretical approach retains all relevant stress and displacement components, and satisfies exactly the equilibrium equations, the interface conditions, and other boundary conditions involving stresses. The stress—strain—temperature relations are satisfied either exactly or in an average sense. The 2-D representation can be used to predict the stress and displacement fields for a laminate containing parallel transverse cracks. In this paper the solutions are used to estimate the dependence of the longitudinal values of Young's modulus, Poisson's ratio, and thermal expansion coefficient on the density of transverse cracks. The second analytical method extends the 2-D model so that it can apply to 3-D problems which arise, for example, when edge effects or orthogonal cracking are to be taken into account. For the special case of very large laminate widths the 2- and 3-D models predict results which are very close to each other for both glass fibre/epoxy and carbon fibre/epoxy laminates. It is shown how the 3-D model can be used to predict the transverse Young's modulus and thermal expansion coefficient. Theoretical predictions of the dependence of Poisson's ratio on transverse crack density indicate that experimental measurements can be sensitive to the strain measurement technique used, and to specimen width when using a transverse extensometer. Theoretical predictions, for glass fibre/epoxy and carbon fibre/epoxy laminates, of the dependence of Young's modulus and Poisson's ratio on the crack density are compared with some experimental results.

Surface measurement errors using commercial scanning white light interferometers

Abstract: This paper examines the performance of commercial scanning white light interferometers in a range of measurement tasks. A step height artefact is used to investigate the response of the instruments at a discontinuity, while gratings with sinusoidal and rectangular profiles are used to investigate the effects of surface gradient and spatial frequency. Results are compared with measurements made with tapping mode atomic force microscopy and discrepancies are discussed with reference to error mechanisms put forward in the published literature. As expected, it is found that most instruments report errors when used in regions close to a discontinuity or those with a surface gradient that is large compared to the acceptance angle of the objective lens. Amongst other findings, however, we report systematic errors that are observed when the surface gradient is considerably smaller. Although these errors are typically less than the mean wavelength, they are significant compared to the vertical resolution of the instrument and indicate that current scanning white light interferometers should be used with some caution if sub-wavelength accuracy is required.