scholarly journals Thermal forcing and ‘classical’ and ‘ultimate’ regimes of Rayleigh–Bénard convection

2019 ◽  
Vol 868 ◽  
pp. 1-4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles R. Doering

The fundamental challenge to characterize and quantify thermal transport in the strongly nonlinear regime of Rayleigh–Bénard convection – the buoyancy-driven flow of a horizontal layer of fluid heated from below – has perplexed the fluid dynamics community for decades. Rayleigh proposed controlling the temperature of thermally conducting boundaries in order to study the onset of convection, in which case vertical heat transport gauges the system response. Conflicting experimental results for ostensibly similar set-ups have confounded efforts to discriminate between two competing theories for how boundary layers and interior flows interact to determine transport through the convecting layer asymptotically far beyond onset. In a conceptually new approach, Bouillaut, Lepot, Aumaître and Gallet (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 861, 2019, R5) devised a procedure to radiatively heat a portion of the fluid domain bypassing rigid conductive boundaries and allowing for dissociation of thermal and viscous boundary layers. Their experiments reveal a new level of complexity in the problem suggesting that heat transport scaling predictions of both theories may be realized depending on details of the thermal forcing.

2017 ◽  
Vol 835 ◽  
pp. 491-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Bakhuis ◽  
Rodolfo Ostilla-Mónico ◽  
Erwin P. van der Poel ◽  
Roberto Verzicco ◽  
Detlef Lohse

A series of direct numerical simulations of Rayleigh–Bénard convection, the flow in a fluid layer heated from below and cooled from above, were conducted to investigate the effect of mixed insulating and conducting boundary conditions on convective flows. Rayleigh numbers between $Ra=10^{7}$ and $Ra=10^{9}$ were considered, for Prandtl numbers $\mathit{Pr}=1$ and $\mathit{Pr}=10$. The bottom plate was divided into patterns of conducting and insulating stripes. The size ratio between these stripes was fixed to unity and the total number of stripes was varied. Global quantities, such as the heat transport and average bulk temperature, and local quantities, such as the temperature just below the insulating boundary wall, were investigated. For the case with the top boundary divided into two halves, one conducting and one insulating, the heat transfer was found to be approximately two-thirds of that for the fully conducting case. Increasing the pattern frequency increased the heat transfer, which asymptotically approached the fully conducting case, even if only half of the surface is conducting. Fourier analysis of the temperature field revealed that the imprinted pattern of the plates is diffused in the thermal boundary layers, and cannot be detected in the bulk. With conducting–insulating patterns on both plates, the trends previously described were similar; however, the half-and-half division led to a heat transfer of about a half of that for the fully conducting case instead of two-thirds. The effect of the ratio of conducting and insulating areas was also analysed, and it was found that, even for systems with a top plate with only 25 % conducting surface, heat transport of 60 % of the fully conducting case can be seen. Changing the one-dimensional stripe pattern to a two-dimensional chequerboard tessellation does not result in a significantly different response of the system.


2008 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jos Verdoold ◽  
Maarten van Reeuwijk ◽  
Mark J. Tummers ◽  
Harm J. J. Jonker ◽  
Kemo Hanjalić

1980 ◽  
Vol 98 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bharat Jhaveri ◽  
G. M. Homsy

We consider the onset of Rayleigh–Bénard convection from random fluctuations arising within a fluid. In the specific case in which the fluctuations are thermodynamically determined, we reduce the problem to a random initial value problem for the Fourier modes. For the case of weak nonlinear convection, it is possible to truncate the number of modes and this truncated set is solved both by a Monte Carlo technique and by moment methods for various Rayleigh numbers. We find three stages in the evolution of ordered convection from random fluctuations which correspond to time intervals in which the fluctuations and the nonlinearity have different degrees of importance. It is shown that no simple moment truncation method will succeed and that the time for onset of convection is a mean over a distribution of times for which members of an ensemble exhibit appreciable convective transport.


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