Turbulence and heat stratification

With applications to meteorology in view, the method of small oscillations is used to investigate the stability of a plane laminar boundary layer in which the density depends in a special way on the distance from the plate. It is found that for a constant Froude number the flow becomes more stable as the Richardson number increases until, at a critical value of the Richardson number that depends on the Froude number, the flow is stable for all disturbance wave lengths and Reynolds numbers. The calculated results are verified by experiment.