Convection and Chaos in Fluids

The book describes the progress made in understanding the phenomena of various hydrodynamic instabilities over the last thirty years. Exact results for the onset of Rayleigh-Benard convection in different systems are presented and approximation techniques like amplitude equations and few-mode truncations are treated at length. Routes to chaos and the characteristics of the chaotic state are reviewed. Certain features of the Taylor-Couette flow and the effect of parametric modulation on hydrodynamic instabilities are discussed. The theory is supplemented by experimental results.