Tollmien-Schlichting waves in the subsonic regime

Abstract

The Tollmien-Schlichting (T-S) waves play a key role in the early stages of boundary layer transition. In a breakthrough work, Grenier, Guo and Nguyen gave the first rigorous construction of the T-S waves of temporal mode for the incompressible fluid. Yang and Zhang recently made an important contribution by constructing the compressible T-S waves of temporal mode for certain boundary layer profiles with Mach number $m<\frac{1}{\sqrt 3}$. In this paper, we construct the T-S waves of both temporal mode and spatial mode to the linearized compressible Navier-Stokes system around the boundary layer flow in the whole subsonic regime $m<1$, including the Blasius profile. Our approach is based on a novel iteration scheme between the quasi-incompressible and quasi-compressible systems, with a key ingredient being the solution of an Orr-Sommerfeld type equation using a new Airy-Airy-Rayleigh iteration instead of Rayleigh-Airy iteration introduced by Grenier, Guo and Nguyen. We believe the method developed in this work can be applied in solving other related problems for subsonic flows.