Taylor number

[1] In 1923 Geoffrey Ingram Taylor introduced this quantity in his article on the stability of flow.

For example, in the case of cylindrical Couette flow with positive Rayleigh discriminant, there are no axisymmetric instabilities.

Here the fluid is subject to the Taylor-Proudman theorem which says that small motions will tend to produce purely two-dimensional perturbations to the overall rotational flow.

In the case of inertial instability such as Taylor–Couette flow, the Taylor number is mathematically analogous to the Grashof number which characterizes the strength of buoyant forces relative to viscous forces in convection.

A Taylor–Couette flow describes the fluid behavior between 2 concentric cylinders in rotation.