Compressibility effects on quasistationary vortex and transient hole patterns through vortex merger

Rupak Mukherjee, Akanksha Gupta, Rajaraman Ganesh

Published 2018-02-09Version 1

The effect of compressibility in hydrodynamic vortex merging has been discussed. In the past, in incompressible limit it has been observed that the merging of a collection of intense point-like vortices arranged uniformly outside a circular vortex, can lead to quasistationary vortex patch and transient hole pattern inside the patch via nonlinear merger process. These patterns are akin to \textquoteleft vortex crystals\textquoteright. Compressibility can introduce a natural acoustic scale to the problem. We find that the natural mode is independent of the number of point-like vortices and the amplitude scales linearly with compressibility. Further it has been identified that after merging, the system exhibits oscillation at a natural frequency together with its harmonics and beats with its own harmonics. The power of the frequency is found to scale as $M^{-2}$, where $M$ is the Mach number. Also the vortex crystals formed out of the merging process are found to melt faster as compressibility is increased.