paper

Direct Calculation of the Turbulent Dissipation Efficiency in Anelastic Convection

arXiv:0810.5370 · doi:10.1088/0004-637X/705/1/285

Abstract

The current understanding of the turbulent dissipation in stellar convective zones is based on the assumption that the turbulence follows Kolmogorov scaling. This assumption is valid for some cases in which the time frequency of the external shear is high (e.g., solar p modes). However, for many cases of astrophysical interest (e.g., binary orbits, stellar pulsations, etc.), the timescales of interest lie outside the regime of applicability of Kolmogorov scaling. We present direct calculations of the dissipation efficiency of the turbulent convective flow in this regime, using simulations of anelastic convection with external forcing. We show that the effects of the turbulent flow are well represented by an effective viscosity coefficient, we provide the values of the effective viscosity as a function of the perturbation frequency and compare our results to the perturbative method for finding the effective viscosity of Penev et al. that can be applied to actual simulations of the surface convective zones of stars.

37 pages, 13 figures

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