Energy dissipation in a shear layer with suction

The rate of viscous energy dissipation in a shear layer of incompressible Newtonian fluid with injection and suction is studied by means of exact solutions, nonlinear and linearized stability theory, and rigorous upper bounds. The injection and suction rates are maintained constant and equal and this leads to solutions with constant throughput. For strong enough suction, expressed in terms of the entry angle between the injection velocity and the boundaries, a steady laminar flow is nonlinearly stable for all Reynolds numbers. For a narrow range of small but nonzero angles, the laminar flow is linearly unstable at high Reynolds numbers. The upper bound on the energy dissipation rate-valid even for turbulent solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations-scales with viscosity in the same way as the laminar dissipation in the vanishing viscosity limit. For both the laminar and turbulent flows, the energy dissipation rate becomes independent of the viscosity for high Reynolds numbers. Hence the laminar energy dissipation rate and the largest possible turbulent energy dissipation rate for flows in this geometry differ by only a prefactor that depends only on the angle of entry. (C) 2000 American Institute of Physics. [S1070-6631(00)02108-5].