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Experimental study of the convection in a rotating tangent cylinder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2018

Kélig Aujogue Open the ORCID record for Kélig Aujogue [Opens in a new window] ,
Alban Pothérat ,
Binod Sreenivasan Open the ORCID record for Binod Sreenivasan [Opens in a new window]  and
François Debray
Kélig Aujogue*
Affiliation:
Applied Mathematics Research Centre, Coventry University, Priory Street, Coventry CV15FB, UK
Alban Pothérat
Affiliation:
Applied Mathematics Research Centre, Coventry University, Priory Street, Coventry CV15FB, UK
Binod Sreenivasan
Affiliation:
Centre for Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India
François Debray
Affiliation:
Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses-Grenoble, CNRS/UGA-UPS-INSA, France
*
†Email address for correspondence: aujogue.kelig@gmail.com
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Abstract

This paper experimentally investigates the convection in a rapidly rotating tangent cylinder (TC), for Ekman numbers down to $E=3.36\times 10^{-6}$. The apparatus consists of a hemispherical fluid vessel heated in its centre by a protruding heating element of cylindrical shape. The resulting convection that develops above the heater, i.e. within the TC, is shown to set in for critical Rayleigh numbers and wavenumbers respectively scaling as $Ra_{c}\sim E^{-4/3}$ and $a_{c}\sim E^{-1/3}$ with the Ekman number $E$. Although exhibiting the same exponents as for plane rotating convection, these laws reflect much larger convective plumes at onset. The structure and dynamics of supercritical plumes are in fact closer to those found in solid rotating cylinders heated from below, suggesting that the confinement within the TC induced by the Taylor–Proudman constraint influences convection in a similar way as solid walls would do. There is a further similarity in that the critical modes in the TC all exhibit a slow retrograde precession at onset. In supercritical regimes, the precession evolves into a thermal wind with a complex structure featuring retrograde rotation at high latitude and either prograde or retrograde rotation at low latitude (close to the heater), depending on the criticality and the Ekman number. The intensity of the thermal wind measured by the Rossby number $Ro$ scales as $Ro\simeq 5.33(Ra_{q}^{\ast })^{0.51}$ with the Rayleigh number based on the heat flux $Ra_{q}^{\ast }\in [10^{-9},10^{-6}]$. This scaling is in agreement with heuristic predictions and previous experiments where the thermal wind is determined by the azimuthal curl of the balance between the Coriolis force and buoyancy. Within the range $Ra\in [2\times 10^{7},10^{9}]$ which we explored, we also observe a transition in the heat transfer through the TC from a diffusivity-free regime where $Nu\simeq 0.38E^{2}Ra^{1.58}$ to a rotation-independent regime where $Nu\simeq 0.2Ra^{0.33}$.

JFM classification

Convection: Convection Geophysical and Geological Flows: Geodynamo Geophysical and Geological Flows: Rotating flows
Type
JFM Papers
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 843 , 25 May 2018 , pp. 355 - 381
Copyright
© 2018 Cambridge University Press 

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