Direct spatial resonance in the laminar boundary layer due to a rotating-disk

Numerical treatment of the linear stability equations is undertaken to investigate the occurrence of direct spatial resonance events in the boundary layer flow due to a rotating-disk. A spectral solution of the eigenvalue problem indicates that algebraic growth of the perturbations shows up, prior to the amplification of exponentially growing instability waves. This phenomenon takes place while the flow is still in the laminar state and it also tends to persist further even if the non-parallelism is taken into account. As a result, there exists the high possibility of this instability mechanism giving rise to nonlinearity and transition, long before the unboundedly growing time-amplified waves.