Phase-locking flows between orthogonally stretching parallel plates

In this paper, we explore the stability and dynamical relevance of a wide variety of steady, time-periodic, quasiperiodic, and chaotic flows arising between orthogonally stretching parallel plates. We first explore the stability of all the steady flow solution families formerly identified by Ayats et al. [“Flows between orthogonally stretching parallel plates,” Phys. Fluids 33, 024103 (2021)], concluding that only the one that originates from the Stokesian approximation is actually stable. When both plates are shrinking at identical or nearly the same deceleration rates, this Stokesian flow exhibits a Hopf bifurcation that leads to stable time-periodic regimes. The resulting time-periodic orbits or flows are tracked for different Reynolds numbers and stretching rates while monitoring their Floquet exponents to identify secondary instabilities. It is found that these time-periodic flows also exhibit Neimark–Sacker bifurcations, generating stable quasiperiodic flows (tori) that may sometimes give rise to chaotic dynamics through a Ruelle–Takens–Newhouse scenario. However, chaotic dynamics is unusually observed, as the quasiperiodic flows generally become phase-locked through a resonance mechanism before a strange attractor may arise, thus restoring the time-periodicity of the flow. In this work, we have identified and tracked four different resonance regions, also known as Arnold tongues or horns. In particular, the 1 : 4 strong resonance region is explored in great detail, where the identified scenarios are in very good agreement with normal form theory.