Research Projects

Turbulent flows are omnipresent and often driven by buoyancy, such as the Sun's convection zone and the Earth's outer core's geomagnetic field. These flows are crucial in industrial processes like heat exchangers and cooling devices. However, other factors like rotation, stratification, and magnetic field also influence natural convective flows, making them complex. This project aims to provide a better understanding of thermally-driven turbulent flows, influenced by Coriolis force and stratification. To achieve this, the project plans to conduct numerical simulations of rotating Rayleigh-Bénard convection, a canonical model for studying flows driven by temperature gradient and affected by rotation. The thermal diffusivity of the fluid varies with temperature, resulting in asymmetry in the flow and non-Oberbeck-Boussinesq convection. To simulate flows at high Rayleigh numbers, a slender convection domain of aspect ratio 0.1 is chosen. The solver Nek5000 is used to perform the simulations, which are based on the spectral element method and are widely used to study various flows. The study will provide insights into the physics of natural convective flows and help build a useful model to understand and predict their properties. The findings will be significant to the turbulence community.