Stability of pressure driven flow in a microchannel.

Abstract

We present the problem of stability of Poiseuille flow in the plane, with slip boundary conditions. We review existing work on the linear theory, and present new results from the nonlinear analysis. For the linear case, the critical Reynolds number increases rapidly with slip length, whereas in the nonlinear case the critical Reynolds number is seen to at first decrease, and then increase approximately linearly with slip length.