Mean flow and spiral defect chaos in Rayleigh-Bénard convection
Abstract
We describe a numerical procedure to construct a modified velocity field that does not have any mean flow. Using this procedure, we present two results. First, we show that, in the absence of the mean flow, spiral defect chaos collapses to a stationary pattern comprising textures of stripes with angular bends. The quenched patterns are characterized by mean wave numbers that approach those uniquely selected by focus-type singularities, which, in the absence of the mean flow, lie at the zigzag instability boundary. The quenched patterns also have larger correlation lengths and are comprised of rolls with less curvature. Secondly, we describe how the mean flow can contribute to the commonly observed phenomenon of rolls terminating perpendicularly into lateral walls. We show that, in the absence of the mean flow, rolls begin to terminate into lateral walls at an oblique angle. This obliqueness increases with the Rayleigh number.
Additional Information
©2003 The American Physical Society. Received 5 December 2002; published 14 May 2003. This work was supported by the Engineering Research Program of the Office of Basic Energy Sciences at the U.S. Department of Energy, Grant Nos. DE-FG03-98ER14891 and DE-FG02-98ER14892. We acknowledge the Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research and the North Carolina Supercomputing Center. We also thank Paul Fischer for helpful discussions.Files
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- 4646
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- CaltechAUTHORS:CHIpre03
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2006-08-31Created from EPrint's datestamp field
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2021-11-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field