Numerical Research on Self-Sustained Oscillation and Chaos of Natural Convection in Horizontal Fluids Layer

Abstract

Numerical simulation was conducted to study self-sustained oscillation and chaos of natural convection in horizontal fluids layer heated from below. The numerical simulation was conducted using SIMPLE algorithm with a QUICK scheme. Discrete time series was analyzed to study stability problem. Correlation dimension was calculated, their frequency characteristics were analyzed and chaos attractor was extracted. The results showed that oscillation appeared when Ra was over 2×104 and chaos appeared when Ra was over 5×106. When parameter was varied, chaos appeared. Strange attractor was used to describe chaos system. Fractal dimension of strange attractor was 1.19. Saturated embedding dimension of phase space reconstruction was 5. The time delay was selected for 5.