Transient dynamics at the onset of Taylor vortices

2003 ◽  
Vol 476 ◽  
pp. 335-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. ABSHAGEN ◽  
O. MEINCKE ◽  
G. PFISTER ◽  
K. A. CLIFFE ◽  
T. MULLIN

The effect of boundary conditions on the ‘critical dynamics’ at the onset of Taylor vortices is investigated in a combined numerical and experimental study. Numerical calculations of Navier–Stokes equations with ‘stress-free’ boundary conditions show that the Landau amplitude equation provides a good model of the transient dynamics. However, this rapidly breaks down when the ‘no-slip’ condition is approached. Apparent ‘critical’ behaviour observed in experiments is shown to have a surprising dependence on the length of the system.

2016 ◽  
Vol 799 ◽  
pp. 413-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudie P. J. Kunnen ◽  
Rodolfo Ostilla-Mónico ◽  
Erwin P. van der Poel ◽  
Roberto Verzicco ◽  
Detlef Lohse

Rotating Rayleigh–Bénard convection, the flow in a rotating fluid layer heated from below and cooled from above, is used to analyse the transition to the geostrophic regime of thermal convection. In the geostrophic regime, which is of direct relevance to most geo- and astrophysical flows, the system is strongly rotating while maintaining a sufficiently large thermal driving to generate turbulence. We directly simulate the Navier–Stokes equations for two values of the thermal forcing, i.e. $Ra=10^{10}$ and $Ra=5\times 10^{10}$, at constant Prandtl number $Pr=1$, and vary the Ekman number in the range $Ek=1.3\times 10^{-7}$ to $Ek=2\times 10^{-6}$, which satisfies both requirements of supercriticality and strong rotation. We focus on the differences between the application of no-slip versus stress-free boundary conditions on the horizontal plates. The transition is found at roughly the same parameter values for both boundary conditions, i.e. at $Ek\approx 9\times 10^{-7}$ for $Ra=1\times 10^{10}$ and at $Ek\approx 3\times 10^{-7}$ for $Ra=5\times 10^{10}$. However, the transition is gradual and it does not exactly coincide in $Ek$ for different flow indicators. In particular, we report the characteristics of the transitions in the heat-transfer scaling laws, the boundary-layer thicknesses, the bulk/boundary-layer distribution of dissipations and the mean temperature gradient in the bulk. The flow phenomenology in the geostrophic regime evolves differently for no-slip and stress-free plates. For stress-free conditions, the formation of a large-scale barotropic vortex with associated inverse energy cascade is apparent. For no-slip plates, a turbulent state without large-scale coherent structures is found; the absence of large-scale structure formation is reflected in the energy transfer in the sense that the inverse cascade, present for stress-free boundary conditions, vanishes.


Author(s):  
Kangrui Zhou ◽  
Yueqiang Shang

AbstractBased on full domain partition, three parallel iterative finite-element algorithms are proposed and analyzed for the Navier–Stokes equations with nonlinear slip boundary conditions. Since the nonlinear slip boundary conditions include the subdifferential property, the variational formulation of these equations is variational inequalities of the second kind. In these parallel algorithms, each subproblem is defined on a global composite mesh that is fine with size h on its subdomain and coarse with size H (H ≫ h) far away from the subdomain, and then we can solve it in parallel with other subproblems by using an existing sequential solver without extensive recoding. All of the subproblems are nonlinear and are independently solved by three kinds of iterative methods. Compared with the corresponding serial iterative finite-element algorithms, the parallel algorithms proposed in this paper can yield an approximate solution with a comparable accuracy and a substantial decrease in computational time. Contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) new parallel algorithms based on full domain partition are proposed for the Navier–Stokes equations with nonlinear slip boundary conditions; (2) nonlinear iterative methods are studied in the parallel algorithms; (3) new theoretical results about the stability, convergence and error estimates of the developed algorithms are obtained; (4) some numerical results are given to illustrate the promise of the developed algorithms.


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