Convection driven by internal heating
Abstract
Two-dimensional direct numerical simulations are conducted for convection sustained by uniform internal heating in a horizontal fluid layer. Top and bottom boundary temperatures are fixed and equal. Prandtl numbers range from 0.01 to 100, and Rayleigh numbers (R) are up to 5x10^5 times the critical R at the onset of convection. The asymmetry between upward and downward heat fluxes is non-monotonic in R. In a broad high-R regime, dimensionless mean temperature scales as R^{-1/5}. We discuss the scaling of mean temperature and heat-flux-asymmetry, which we argue are better diagnostic quantities than the conventionally used top and bottom Nusselt numbers.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1210.8154,
title = {Convection driven by internal heating},
author = {David Goluskin and Edward A. Spiegel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1210.8154},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
14 pages, 8 figures, 6 videos; to appear in Physics Letters A; Color and grayscale versions provided; v2: ancillary videos fixed