The Beauty of Turbulent convection

A highly technical paper from Guenter Ahlers of the UC Santa Barbara Physics department talks about Tubulent convection in an idealized cylinder.  That’s pretty hi-faluting even for me, but the attached images are of such beauty I had to share.  If you don’t know what Turbulent convection is, here’s the “scientific description”:

Turbulent convection in a fluid heated from below and cooled from above, called Rayleigh-Bénard convection, plays a major role in numerous natural and industrial processes. Beyond a particular temperature difference, the heated fluid rises and the cooled fluid falls, thereby forming one or more convection cells. Increasing the difference causes the well-defined cells to become turbulent. Turbulent convection occurs in earth’s outer core, atmosphere, and oceans, and is found in the outer layer of the sun  and in giant planets

In short, it’s how warm air (above) and cold air (below) circulate between each other.  Check out the paper for a few more pictures and more math than you can

via Physics – Turbulent convection.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

Science cfd