Transient growth in Rayleigh-B\'enard-Poiseuille/Couette convection
  An investigation of the effect of a destabilizing cross-stream temperature gradient on the transient growth phenomenon of plane Poiseuille flow and plane Couette flow is presented. Only the streamwise-uniform and nearly streamwise-uniform disturbances are highly influenced by the Rayleigh number Ra and Prandtl number Pr. The maximum optimal transient growth G max of streamwise-uniform disturbances increases slowly with increasing Ra and decreasing Pr. For all Ra and Pr, at moderately large Reynolds numbersRe, the supremum of G max is always attained for streamwise-uniform perturbations (or nearly streamwise-uniform perturbations, in the case of plane Couette flow) which produce large streamwise streaks and Rayleigh-B\'enard convection rolls (RB). The optimal growth curves retain the same large-Reynolds-number scaling as in pure shear flow. A 3D vector model of the governing equations demonstrates that the short-time behavior is governed by the classical lift-up mechanism and that the influence of Ra on this mechanism is secondary and negligible. The optimal input for the largest long-time response is given by the adjoint of the dominant eigenmode with respect to the energy scalar product: the RBeigenmode without its streamwise velocity component. These short-time and long-time responses depict, to leading order, the optimal transient growth G(t). At moderately large Ra (or small Pr at a fixed Ra), the dominant adjoint mode is a good approximation to the optimal initial condition for all time. Over a general class of norms that can be considered as growth functions, the results remain qualitatively similar, for example, the dominant adjoint eigenmode still approximates the maximum optimal response. 
J. John Soundar Jerome, Jean-Marc Chomaz and Patrick Huerre
physics.flu-dyn