Boundary Zonal Flow in Rotating Turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard Convection

Xuan Zhang; Dennis P M van Gils; Susanne Horn; Marcel Wedi; Lukas Zwirner; Guenter Ahlers; Robert E Ecke; Stephan Weiss; Eberhard Bodenschatz; Olga Shishkina

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.084505

Boundary Zonal Flow in Rotating Turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard Convection

Phys Rev Lett. 2020 Feb 28;124(8):084505. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.084505.

Authors

Xuan Zhang¹, Dennis P M van Gils^{1

2}, Susanne Horn^{1

3

4}, Marcel Wedi¹, Lukas Zwirner¹, Guenter Ahlers^{1

5}, Robert E Ecke^{1

6}, Stephan Weiss^{1

7}, Eberhard Bodenschatz^{1

8

9}, Olga Shishkina¹

Affiliations

¹ Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, 37077 Göttingen, Germany.
² Physics of Fluids Group, J.M. Burgers Center for Fluid Dynamics, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, Netherlands.
³ Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA.
⁴ Centre for Fluid and Complex Systems, Coventry University, Coventry CV1 5FB, United Kingdom.
⁵ Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA.
⁶ Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA.
⁷ Max Planck-University of Twente Center for Complex Fluid Dynamics.
⁸ Institute for the Dynamics of Complex Systems, Georg-August-University Göttingen, 37073 Göttingen, Germany.
⁹ Laboratory of Atomic and Solid-State Physics and Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA.

PMID: 32167333
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.084505

Abstract

For rapidly rotating turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection in a slender cylindrical cell, experiments and direct numerical simulations reveal a boundary zonal flow (BZF) that replaces the classical large-scale circulation. The BZF is located near the vertical side wall and enables enhanced heat transport there. Although the azimuthal velocity of the BZF is cyclonic (in the rotating frame), the temperature is an anticyclonic traveling wave of mode one, whose signature is a bimodal temperature distribution near the radial boundary. The BZF width is found to scale like Ra^{1/4}Ek^{2/3} where the Ekman number Ek decreases with increasing rotation rate.