  It is shown that the physical interpretation of Elie Cartan three-dimensional
space torsion as couple asymmetric stress, has the effect of damping,
previously Riemannian unstable Couette planar shear flow, leading to stability
of the flow in the Lagrangean sense. Actually, since the flow speed is
inversely proportional to torsion, it has the effect of causing a damping in
the planar flow atenuating the instability effect. In this sense we may say
that Cartan torsion induces shear viscous asymmetric stresses in the fluid,
which are able to damp the instability of the flow. The stability of the flow
is computed from the sectional curvature in non-Riemannian three-dimensional
manifold. Marginal stability is asssumed by making the sectional non-Riemannian
curvature zero, which allows us to determine the speeds of flows able to induce
this stability. The ideas discussed here show that torsion plays the
geometrical role of magnetic field in hydromagnetic instability of Couette
flows recently investigated by Bonnano and Urpin (PRE, (2007,in press) can be
extended and applied to plastic flows with microstructure defects. Recently
Riemannian asymmetric stresses in magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) have been
considered by Billig (2004).
