Boundary Zonal Flow in Rotating Turbulent Rayleigh-B\'enard Convection
Fluid Dynamics
2020-03-04 v1
Abstract
For rapidly rotating turbulent Rayleigh--B\'enard convection in a slender cylindrical cell, experiments and direct numerical simulations reveal a boundary zonal flow (BZF) that replaces the classical large-scale circulation. The BZF is located near the vertical side wall and enables enhanced heat transport there. Although the azimuthal velocity of the BZF is cyclonic (in the rotating frame), the temperature is an anticyclonic traveling wave of mode one whose signature is a bimodal temperature distribution near the radial boundary. The BZF width is found to scale like where the Ekman number decreases with increasing rotation rate.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1911.09584,
title = {Boundary Zonal Flow in Rotating Turbulent Rayleigh-B\'enard Convection},
author = {Xuan Zhang and Dennis P. M. van Gils and Susanne Horn and Marcel Wedi and Lukas Zwirner and Guenter Ahlers and Robert E. Ecke and Stephan Weiss and Eberhard Bodenschatz and Olga Shishkina},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.09584},
year = {2020}
}