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Realizing the ultimate scaling in convection turbulence by spatially decoupling the thermal and viscous boundary layers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2021

Shufan Zou Open the ORCID record for Shufan Zou [Opens in a new window]  and
Yantao Yang Open the ORCID record for Yantao Yang [Opens in a new window]
Shufan Zou
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, PR China
Yantao Yang*
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, PR China Beijing Innovation Center for Engineering Science and Advanced Technology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, PR China
*
†Email address for correspondence: yantao.yang@pku.edu.cn
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Abstract

Turbulent convection plays a crucial role in many natural environments and engineering applications. One of the most fundamental questions is how the heat flux depends on the thermal driving and fluid property. It has been proposed that when the fluid layer experiences extremely strong thermal driving, the boundary layers will become fully turbulent and the so-called ultimate regime will emerge. In this work we proposed a numerical experiment in which the thermal boundary layer can be spatially decoupled with the viscous one. We demonstrate that, once the thermal boundary layer is fully decoupled from the viscous boundary layer and locates entirely inside the turbulent bulk, the scaling laws corresponding to the ultimate regime can be obtained, namely $Nu \sim Ra^{1/2}Pr^{1/2}$ and $Re \sim Ra^{1/2} Pr^{-1/2}$ with $Nu$ being the Nusselt number, $Re$ the Reynolds number, $Ra$ the Rayleigh number and $Pr$ the Prandtl number, respectively. Therefore, our results support the physical conjecture of the ultimate regime for the turbulent convection.

JFM classification

Turbulent Flows: Turbulent convection

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JFM Rapids
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Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 919 , 25 July 2021 , R3
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© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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