Stability and receptivity analyses of the heated flat-plate boundary layer with variable viscosity

This article presents the modal, non-modal, and resolvent analyses of the boundary layer developed over a heated flat-plate with temperature-dependent viscosity using linear stability theory. The governing equations are derived in the normal velocity–vorticity form by imposing small infinitesimal disturbances on the base flow with the Oberbeck-Boussinesq (OB) approximation. The spectral method is employed to discretize the governing stability equations in the wall-normal direction. The base flow comes from the similarity solution using R-K4th order method along with shooting techniques. The effects of viscosity stratification, inertia, shearing, and buoyancy on the stability of the boundary layer are investigated by varying the sensitivity parameter $\left(ϵ\right)$, Reynolds $\left(Re\right)$, Prandtl $\left(Pr\right)$, and Richardson numbers $\left(Ri\right)$. The modal analysis shows the time-asymptotic behavior of the disturbances and onset of instability is mainly caused by amplification of Tollmien–Schlichting (T-S) waves similar to as observe in the traditional Blasius case. The modal stability increases with increase in sensitivity parameter and stabilizing effects become more pronounced for liquid than gas. However, the thermal effects lead to destabilize the flow and strong destabilizing effects produced for higher Prandtl number. On the other hand, non-modal analysis displays an early transient growth of disturbances and an existence of these non-normality effects identified from the pseudospectra via. resolvent analysis. The non-modal growth increases with increase in $ϵ$ even though T-S modes shift towards the damped region, which indicates the continuous modes in the eigenspectrum are more dominated than the discrete T-S modes due to the thermal effects. To clarify this qualitative change, a component-wise input–output analysis is performed to measure the receptivity to particular external disturbances. The results show the thermal energy of the disturbances is converted into kinetic energy due to thermal effects, resulting in strong receptivity amplification at the continuous mode due to the non-normality of the linear operator. Thus, the boundary layer under the influence of viscosity stratification, heating, and shearing effects is vulnerable to free-stream disturbances that could significantly affect bypass transition