Experimental study of the instability of a film flowing down a vertical fiber

The wavy dynamics of a viscous film flowing axisymmetrically on a vertical fiber is characterized experimentally. The study of the initial response of the flow to natural noise shows a well-defined transition between a convective and an absolute instability [1]. In the convective case, disturbances of controlled frequencies have been applied at inlet. The flow responds to inlet excitation at frequencies lower than a well-defined cut-off frequency. A good agreement has been found with the linear stability analysis and with the solution to a two-equation model [2] in the nonlinear regime.