CHARACTERIZATION OF EXPERIMENTAL TIME-SERIES FROM TAYLOR-COUETTE FLOW

Rotational Taylor-Couette flow shows a rich variety of well-defined and controllable scenarios. Even for short cylinders, where the number of possible flow states is found to be very small, period doubling cascades, intermittencies, homoclinic orbits and n-tori can be found depending on boundary conditions. We characterize these flow states by fractal dimensions, Lyapunov spectra and entropies. In the experiments the axial velocity component was measured using laser-Doppler anemometry and the phase space was reconstructed by using delay time coordinates. A simple noise reduction algorithm was applied to the noisy data set to improve the accuracy of the estimation of the dynamical variables.