Rotating Thermal Convection

As a continuation of my work on scaling laws in Rayleigh-Bénard and Taylor-Couette flows, I started investigating the effect of boundary heating vs volumetric heating. While convective flows are heated and cooled both through the boundaries (like boiling water in a pan) and by internal processes (phase changes of water, chemical and nuclear reactions), most research has historically taken place on boundary-driven convection. Understanding in which ways the shape of heating matters is essential for developing models for both engineering and geo- and astrophysical applications.

We have recently performed a large-scale simulation campaign to characterize how rotating Internally Heated Convection (where the heating comes entirely from volumetric processes) behaves across a large parameter space of Rayleigh and Ekman numbers, showing how rotation may enhance vertical convection and overall heat transfer. We later analyzed the dependence on the Prandtl number of rotating IHC, showing how high Prandtl numbers produced “dead zones” and low Prandtl numbers helped recover symmetry in penetrative internally heated convection. We intend to push the boundaries of our simulations further, and hopefully reach the two regimes which are considered the asymptotic behaviour of the system at high Reynolds number: the “ultimate” regime, for no rotation, and the “geostrophic” regime, for strong rotation.

Furthermore, we recently investigated how selective switching between boundary and volumetric cooling can lead to transitions to diffusivity-free scaling laws appearing in Internally Heated Convection at much lower forcings than expected. We are currently extending our work to the rotating cases.