Rayleigh-Bénard convection and turbulence in liquid helium

Abstract

Recent advances in the understanding of Rayleigh-Benard convection and turbulence are reviewed in light of work using liquid helium. The discussion includes both experiments which have probed the steady flows preceding time dependence and experiments which have been directed toward understanding the ways in which turbulence evolves. Comparison is made where appropriate to the many important contributions which have been obtained using room-temperature fluids, and a discussion is given explaining the advantages of cryogenic techniques. Brief reviews are given for recent experimental investigations of convection in 3 He-4 He mixtures-in both the superfluid and the normal states-and investigations of convection in rotating layers of liquid helium. C. Superfluid 3 He-4 He mixtures D. Convection with rotation VI. Summary and Future Directions Acknowledgments References

Optimal Taylor–Couette flow: radius ratio dependence

“…Instabilities (Swinney & Gollub 1981;Pfister & Rehberg 1981;Pfister et al 1988;Chandrasekhar 1981;Drazin & Reid 1981;Busse 1967), nonlinear dynamics and chaos (Lorenz 1963;Ahlers 1974;Behringer 1985;Dominguez-Lerma et al 1986;Strogatz 1994), pattern formation (Andereck et al 1986;Cross & Hohenberg 1993;Bodenschatz et al 2000), and turbulence (Siggia 1994;Grossmann & Lohse 2000;Kadanoff 2001;Lathrop et al 1992b;Ahlers et al 2009;Lohse & Xia 2010) have been studied in both TC and RB and both numerically and experimentally. The main reasons behind the popularity of these systems are, in addition to the fact that they are closed systems, as mentioned previously, their simplicity due to the high amount of symmetries present.…”

Power-Law Behavior of Power Spectra in Low Prandtl Number Rayleigh-Bénard Convection

“…+r, 47.20.Bp, 47.27.Te, 47.52. +j Significant insight into the onset of chaotic dynamics in fluid systems, and continuum systems in general, has been gained from cryogenic Rayleigh-Bénard convection experiments [1][2][3][4]; for a review, see [5,6]. Two of the most dramatic discoveries were the observation of time dependence almost immediately above the onset of convective flow, and the power-law falloff in frequency for the power spectral density derived from time series of a global measurement of the temperature difference across the fluid at fixed heat flow [1].…”

2000 Physical Acoustics Summer School (PASS 00). Volume III: Background Materials

“…Ahlers and Behringer [1978] studied the onset of turbulence in a cylindrical layer of fluid, Gollub and Benson [1980] found quasiperiodicity, intermittency and other nonlinear phenomena using a rectangular layer of water, and Swinney and Gollub [1978] observed a quasiperiodic route to chaos, later investigated with sophisticated methods from nonlinear dynamics by Glazier and Libchaber [1988]. A review on the topic of Rayleigh-Benard convection has been given by Behringer [1985].…”