Subcritical transition to turbulence of a precessing flow in a cylindrical vessel

The transition to turbulence in a precessing cylindrical vessel is experimentally investigated. Our measurements are performed for a nearly resonant configuration with an initially laminar flow dominated by an inertial mode with azimuthal wave number m = 1 superimposed on a solid body rotation. By increasing the precession ratio, we observe a transition from the laminar to a non-linear regime, which then breakdowns to turbulence for larger precession ratio. Our measurements show that the transition to turbulence is subcritical, with a discontinuity of the wall-pressure and the power consumption at the threshold epsilon(LT). The turbulence is self-sustained below this threshold, describing a bifurcation diagram with a hysteresis. In this range of the control parameters, the turbulent flows can suddenly collapse after a finite duration, leading to a definitive relaminarization of the flow. The average lifetime of the turbulence increases rapidly when epsilon tends to epsilon(LT). (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.