MEAN FLOW SUPPRESSION BY ENDWALLS IN OSCILLATORY BINARY FLUID CONVECTION

Competition between traveling and standing waves in binary fluid mixtures with a negative separation ratio S is studied for realistic boundary conditions. For typical experimental values of the Prandtl and Lewis numbers the suppression of net mean flow in traveling waves due to the presence of endwalls is found to have negligible effect (approximately 1 part in 10(4)) on the coefficients of the nonlinear terms in the amplitude equations. The dominant effect of the endwalls enters therefore at linear order. The results are used to predict the range of S in which the initial instability is to stable ''chevron'' states.