CHARACTERIZATION OF PERIOD-DOUBLING SCENARIOS IN TAYLOR-COUETTE FLOW

The Taylor-Couette system is an extraordinary hydrodynamic system, showing almost all low-dimensional scenarios for routes to chaos for proper boundary conditions. For a period-doubling route to chaos, bifurcation diagrams were experimentally recorded and the dynamic variables such as fractal dimensions, Lyapunov exponents, and entropies are estimated as a function of Reynolds number. The evolution of the correlation dimension D2 with Reynolds number Re shows that D2 is-proportional-to (Re-Re(c))1/4, which is similar to continuous phase transitions. An investigation of the critical phenomena must be performed as high-precision hydrodynamic experiments because the results show that the kind of scenario depends sensitively on the boundary conditions.