We present a fluid dynamics video which illustrates the Lagrangian aspects of local heat transfer in turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection. The data are obtained from a direct numerical simulation.
The characterization of heat and momentum fluxes in wall-bounded turbulence is of paramount importance for a plethora of applications, ranging from engineering to Earth sciences. However, how the turbulent structures associated with velocity and temperature fluctuations interact to produce the emergent flux signatures, is not evident till date. In this work, we investigate this fundamental issue by studying the switching patterns of intermittently occurring turbulent fluctuations from one state to another, a phenomenon called persistence. We discover that the persistence patterns for heat and …
The vectoral wind structure of daytime atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) turbulence is strongly dependent on the balance between shear-driven turbulence production of horizontal fluctuations (driven by winds at the mesoscale), and buoyancy-driven turbulence production of vertical velocity fluctuations (driven by solar heating), characterized by the global instability state parameter $-z_i/L > 0$. In the fully shear-driven neutral limit $-z_i/L \rightarrow 0$, the surface layer is dominated by coherent streamwise-elongated concentrations of negative streamwise fluctuating velocity (low-speed str…
Large-scale intermittency is a widely observed phenomenon in convective surface layer turbulence that induces non-Gaussian temperature statistics, while such signature is not observed for velocity signals. Although approaches based on probability density functions have been used so far, those are not able to explain to what extent the signals' temporal structure impacts the statistical characteristics of the velocity and temperature fluctuations. To tackle this issue, a visibility network analysis is carried out on a field-experimental dataset from a convective atmospheric surface layer flow. …
We perform experimental study of turbulent transport of nanoparticles in convective turbulence with the Rayleigh number $\sim 10^8$ in the air flow. We measure temperature field in many locations by a temperature probe equipped with 11 E-thermocouples. Nanoparticles of the size $\sim 70$ nm in diameter are produced by Advanced Electrospray Aerosol Generator. To determine the number density of nanoparticles, we use Condensation Particle Counter. We demonstrate that the joint action of turbulent effects (which are important in the core flow) and molecular effects (which are essential near the bo…
Direct numerical simulations have been performed for turbulent thermal convection between horizontal no-slip, permeable walls with a distance $H$ and a constant temperature difference $ΔT$ at the Rayleigh number $Ra=3\times10^{3}-10^{10}$. On the no-slip wall surfaces $z=0$, $H$ the wall-normal (vertical) transpiration velocity is assumed to be proportional to the local pressure fluctuation, i.e. $w=-βp'/ρ, +βp'/ρ$ (Jiménez et al., J. Fluid Mech., vol. 442, 2001, pp. 89-117), and the property of the permeable wall is given by the permeability parameter $βU$ normalised with the buoyancy-induced…
Plumes in a convective flow are considered to be relevant to the turbulent transport in convection. The effective mass, momentum, and heat transports in the convective turbulence are investigated in the framework of time--space double averaging procedure, where a field quantity is decomposed into three parts: the spatiotemporal mean (spatial average of the time-averaged) field, the dispersion or coherent fluctuation, and the random or incoherent fluctuation. With this framework, turbulent correlations in the mean-field equations are divided into the dispersion/coherent and random/incoherent co…
The orientational dynamics of inertialess anisotropic particles transported by two-dimensional convective turbulent flows display a coexistence of regular and chaotic features. We numerically demonstrate that very elongated particles (rods) align preferentially with the direction of the fluid flow, i.e., horizontally close to the isothermal walls and dominantly vertically in the bulk. This behaviour is due to the the presence of a persistent large scale circulation flow structure, which induces strong shear at wall boundaries and in up/down-welling regions. The near-wall horizontal alignment o…
Many geophysical and astrophysical phenomena are driven by turbulent fluid dynamics, containing behaviors separated by tens of orders of magnitude in scale. While direct simulations have made large strides toward understanding geophysical systems, such models still inhabit modest ranges of the governing parameters that are difficult to extrapolate to planetary settings. The canonical problem of rotating Rayleigh-Bénard convection provides an alternate approach - isolating the fundamental physics in a reduced setting. Theoretical studies and asymptotically-reduced simulations in rotating convec…
Thermal plumes are the energy containing eddy motions that carry heat and momentum in a convective boundary layer. The detailed understanding of their structure is of fundamental interest for a range of applications, from wall-bounded engineering flows to quantifying surface-atmosphere flux exchanges. We address the aspect of Reynolds stress anisotropy associated with the intermittent nature of heat transport in thermal plumes by performing an invariant analysis of the Reynolds stress tensor in an unstable atmospheric surface layer flow, using a field-experimental dataset. Given the intermitte…
Studying the atmospheric Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) is crucial to understand the climate of a planet. The meteorological measurements by the instruments onboard InSight at a latitude of 4.5$^{\circ}$N make a uniquely rich dataset to study the active turbulent dynamics of the daytime PBL on Mars. Here we use the high-sensitivity continuous pressure, wind, temperature measurements in the first 400 sols of InSight operations (from northern late winter to midsummer) to analyze wind gusts, convective cells and vortices in Mars' daytime PBL. We compare InSight measurements to turbulence-resolvin…
A closure theory is developed for inhomogeneous turbulent flow, which enables a systematic derivation of the turbulence constitutive relations without relying on any empirical parameters. Renormalized-perturbation approximation is performed in the convective coordinate frame based on the mean flow, successfully incorporating the convective integration in generally covariant manner.
Formation and evolution of turbulence in convectively unstable internal solitary waves of depression shoaling over gentle slopes in the South China Sea
Cornell University(康奈尔大学);University of Washington(华盛顿大学);University of Waterloo(滑铁卢大学);Wandering Wakhs Research(Wandering Wakhs 研究)
Horizontally extended turbulent convection, termed mesoscale convection in natural systems, remains a challenge to investigate in both experiments and simulations. This is particularly so for very low molecular Prandtl numbers as in stellar convection and in Earth's outer core. The present study reports three-dimensional direct numerical simulations of turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection in square boxes of side length $L$ and height $H$ with the aspect ratio $Γ=L/H$ of 25, for Prandtl numbers that span almost 4 orders of magnitude, $10^{-3}\le Pr \le 7$, and Rayleigh numbers $10^5 \le Ra \le …
Persistence is defined as the probability that the local value of a fluctuating field remains at a particular state for a certain amount of time, before being switched to another state. The concept of persistence has been found to have many diverse practical applications, ranging from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics to financial dynamics to distribution of time scales in turbulent flows and many more. In this study, we carry out a detailed analysis of the statistical characteristics of the persistence probability density functions (PDFs) of velocity and temperature fluctuations in the su…
Recently, the nature of viscoelastic drag-reducing turbulence (DRT), especially maximum drag reduction (MDR) state, has become a focus of controversy. It has long been regarded as polymers-modulated inertial turbulence (IT), but is challenged by the newly proposed concept of elasto-inertial turbulence (EIT). This study is to re-picture DRT in parallel plane channels by introducing dynamics of EIT based on statistical and budget analysis for a series of flow regimes from the onset of DR to EIT. Energy conversion between velocity fluctuations and polymers as well as polymeric pressure redistribu…
To understand turbulent convection at very high Rayleigh numbers typical of natural phenomena, computational studies in slender cells are an option if the needed resources have to be optimized within available limits. However, the accompanying horizontal confinement affects some properties of the flow. Here, we explore the characteristics of turbulent fluctuations in the velocity and temperature fields in a cylindrical convection cell of aspect ratio 0.1 by varying the Prandtl number $Pr$ between 0.1 and 200 at a fixed Rayleigh number $Ra = 3 \times 10^{10}$, and find that the fluctuations wea…
Self-consistent closure theory for passive-scalar turbulence has been developed on the basis of the Hessian of the scalar field. As a primitive indicator of spatial structure of the scalar, we employ the Hessian into the core of the theory to properly characterize the time scale intrinsic to the scalar field itself. The resultant closure model is now endowed with several realistic features, i.e. the scale-locality of the interscale interaction, the detailed conservation, and the memory-fading effect. Applying the current theory to the inertial-convective range eventually leads to self-consiste…
Direct Numerical Simulations of Ice-Ocean Boundary Turbulence
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill(北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校);University of Maryland at College Park(马里兰大学帕克分校);Oregon State University(俄勒冈州立大学);University of Tasmania(塔斯马尼亚大学);University of Canterbury(坎特伯雷大学)
We study the properties of various Eulerian contributions to fluid particle acceleration by using well-resolved direct numerical simulations of isotropic turbulence, with the grid resolution as high as $12288^3$ and the Taylor-scale Reynolds number $R_λ$ in the range between 140 and 1300. The variance of convective acceleration, when normalized by Kolmogorov scales, increases linearly with $R_λ$, consistent with simple theoretical arguments, but very strongly differing from phenomenological predictions of Kolmogorov's hypothesis as well as Eulerian multifractal models. The scaling of the local…
We present an investigation of the root-mean-square (rms) temperature $σ_T$ and the rms velocity $σ_w$ in the bulk of Rayleigh-Bénard turbulence, using new experimental data from the current study and experimental and numerical data from previous studies. We find that, once scaled by the convective temperature $θ_*$, the value of $σ_T$ at the cell centre is a constant, i.e. $σ_{T,c}/θ_* \approx 0.85$, over a wide range of the Rayleigh number ($10^{8}\leq Ra\leq 10^{15}$) and the Prandtl number ($0.7\leq Pr \leq 23.34$), and is independent of the surface topographies of the top and bottom plate…
State Key Laboratory of Photon-Technology in Western China Energy, International Collaborative Center on Photoelectric Technology and Nano Functional Materials, Institute of Photonics & Photon Technology, Northwest University(西北大学);School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University(西北工业大学自动化学院);School of Physics, Northwest University(西北大学物理学院)
Motivated by understanding the dynamics of stellar and planetary interiors, we have performed a set of direct numerical simulations of Boussinesq convection in a rotating full sphere. The domain is internally heated with fixed temperature and stress-free boundary conditions, but fixed heat flux and no-slip boundary conditions are also briefly considered. We particularly focus on the large-scale coherent structures and the mean zonal flows that can develop in the system. At Prandtl number of unity, as the thermal forcing (measured by the Rayleigh number) is increased above the value for the ons…