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Abstract

The instability of pipe flow has been a subject of extensive research, yet a significant gap remains between experimental observations and theoretical predictions. This study revisits the classical problem of kinetic energy instability of pipe flow using contemporary computational methods. We focus on finite domains to address the limitations of previous infinite pipe analyses. We analyze two different cases by imposing homogeneous Dirichlet and periodic boundary conditions. Our investigation reveals that the critical Reynolds number for instability approaches values established by Joseph and Carmi $(1969)$ as the length of the pipe increases. Specifically, when homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions are applied, the critical Reynolds number converges monotonically to a value of $\RE_c \leq 81.62$. In contrast, for the periodic case, the critical Reynolds number varies periodically with the length of the pipe, exhibiting local minima at $\RE_c = 81.58$. We further characterize the shape of the perturbations by computing their magnitude and vorticity for several local minima and maxima associated with the periodic problem. Focusing on the perturbations obtained by imposing the homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions, we compute their temporal evolution. As expected, the $L^2$-norm of the perturbation decreases from the initial time when solving for the critical Reynolds number, while it initially increases and then eventually decreases for Reynolds numbers exceeding the critical value.