Mean flow boundary layer effects of hydrodynamic instability of impedance wall

The Ingard–Myers condition, modelling the effect of an impedance wall under a mean flow by assuming a vanishing boundary layer, is known to lead to an ill-posed problem in time-domain. By analysing the stability of a mean flow, uniform except for a linear boundary layer of thickness h, in the incompressible limit, we show that the flow is absolutely unstable for h smaller than a critical hc and convectively unstable or stable otherwise. This critical hc is by nature independent of wave length or frequency and is a property of liner and mean flow only. An analytical approximation of hc is given for a mass-spring-damper liner. For an aeronautically relevant example, hc is shown to be extremely small, which explains why this instability has never been observed in industrial practice. A systematically regularised boundary condition, to replace the Ingard–Myers condition, is proposed that retains the effects of a finite h, such that the stability of the approximate problem correctly follows the stability of the real problem.