Flapping states of a flag in an inviscid fluid: bistability and the transition to chaos
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Updated: Jul 6, 2026

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Silas Alben1, Michael J Shelley
1School of Mathematics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0160, USA. alben@math.gatech.edu
Abstract:
We investigate the "flapping flag" instability through a model for an inextensible flexible sheet in an inviscid 2D flow with a free vortex sheet. We solve the fully-nonlinear dynamics numerically and find a transition from a power spectrum dominated by discrete frequencies to an apparently continuous spectrum of frequencies. We compute the linear stability domain which agrees with previous approximate models in scaling but differs by large multiplicative factors. We also find hysteresis, in agreement with previous experiments.
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