| A numerical technique has been developed in the context of spatio-temporal stability analysis. The convective/absolute nature of instability determines the time-asymptotic response of a linearly unstable flow, either in the form an oscillator or in the form of a noise amplifier. This depends on the location of pinch point singularities of the dispersion relations obtained via linear stability analyses. A new and efficient approach to locate such singularities is presented. Local analyticity of the dispersion relations was exploited via the Cauchy-Riemann equations in a quasi-Newton's root-finding procedure employing numerical Jacobians. Initial guesses provided by temporal stability analyses have been shown to converge to the pinch points even in the presence of multiple saddle points for various Falkner-Skan wedge profiles.; This effort was motivated by the phenomenon of spontaneous symmetry breaking in flow over a cone. At large enough incidence, a pair of vortices develop on the leeward side of the cone which eventually become asymmetric as the angle of attack is increased further. A conical, thin-layer Navier-Stokes solver was employed to investigate the effect of flowfield saddles in this process. The approximate factorization scheme incorporated in the solver was shown analytically to be symmetric to eliminate possible sources of asymmetry. Local grid resolution studies were performed to demonstrate the importance of correctly computing the leeside saddle point and the secondary separation and reattchment points. Topological studies of the flow field as it loses symmetry agreed well with previous qualitative experimental observations. However, the original goal of this study, to settle an ongoing controversy regarding the nature of the instability responsible for symmetry breaking, could not be realized due to computational inadequacy. It is conjectured that the process is governed by an absolute instability similar to that observed in a flow over a circular cylinder. The newly developed numerical technique can be utilized to support this conjecture once the associated PDE eigenvalue problem becomes computationally feasible. |
