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Changes in the boundary-layer structure at the edge of the ultimate regime in vertical natural convection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2017

Chong Shen Ng Open the ORCID record for Chong Shen Ng [Opens in a new window] ,
Andrew Ooi ,
Detlef Lohse Open the ORCID record for Detlef Lohse [Opens in a new window]  and
Daniel Chung Open the ORCID record for Daniel Chung [Opens in a new window]
Chong Shen Ng*
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia
Andrew Ooi
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia
Detlef Lohse
Affiliation:
Physics of Fluids Group, MESA+ Institute and J. M. Burgers Centre for Fluid Dynamics and Max Planck Center Twente, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500AE Enschede, The Netherlands Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
Daniel Chung
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia
*
†Email address for correspondence: [email protected]
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Abstract

In thermal convection for very large Rayleigh numbers ($Ra$), the thermal and viscous boundary layers are expected to undergo a transition from a classical state to an ultimate state. In the former state, the boundary-layer thicknesses follow a laminar-like Prandtl–Blasius–Polhausen scaling, whereas in the latter, the boundary layers are turbulent with logarithmic corrections in the sense of Prandtl and von Kármán. Here, we report evidence of this transition via changes in the boundary-layer structure of vertical natural convection (VC), which is a buoyancy-driven flow between differentially heated vertical walls. The numerical dataset spans $Ra$ values from $10^{5}$ to $10^{9}$ and a constant Prandtl number value of $0.709$. For this $Ra$ range, the VC flow has been previously found to exhibit classical state behaviour in a global sense. Yet, with increasing $Ra$, we observe that near-wall higher-shear patches occupy increasingly larger fractions of the wall areas, which suggest that the boundary layers are undergoing a transition from the classical state to the ultimate shear-dominated state. The presence of streaky structures – reminiscent of the near-wall streaks in canonical wall-bounded turbulence – further supports the notion of this transition. Within the higher-shear patches, conditionally averaged statistics yield a logarithmic variation in the local mean temperature profiles, in agreement with the log law of the wall for mean temperature, and an $Ra^{0.37}$ effective power-law scaling of the local Nusselt number. The scaling of the latter is consistent with the logarithmically corrected $1/2$ power-law scaling predicted for ultimate thermal convection for very large $Ra$. Collectively, the results from this study indicate that turbulent and laminar-like boundary layer coexist in VC at moderate to high $Ra$ and this transition from the classical state to the ultimate state manifests as increasingly larger shear-dominated patches, consistent with the findings reported for Rayleigh–Bénard convection and Taylor–Couette flows.

JFM classification

Turbulent Flows: Turbulence simulation Turbulent Flows: Turbulent boundary layers Turbulent Flows: Turbulent convection
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Papers
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 825 , 25 August 2017 , pp. 550 - 572
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© 2017 Cambridge University Press 

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