Tidal instability in a rotating and differentially heated ellipsoidal shell

Abstract

The stability of a rotating flow in a triaxial ellipsoidal shell with an imposed temperature difference between inner and outer boundaries is studied numerically. We demonstrate that (i) a stable temperature field encourages the tidal instability, (ii) the tidal instability can grow on a convective flow, which confirms its relevance to geo- and astrophysical contexts and (iii) its growth rate decreases when the intensity of convection increases. Simple scaling laws characterizing the evolution of the heat flux based on a competition between viscous and thermal boundary layers are derived analytically and verified numerically. Our results confirm that thermal and tidal effects have to be simultaneously taken into account when studying geophysical and astrophysical flows.

References in corpus (4)

• Experimental analysis of the Strato-rotational Instability in a cylindrical Couette flow
• A systematic numerical study of the tidal instability in a rotating triaxial ellipsoid
• Elliptical instability of a flow in a rotating shell
• Mean effects of turbulence on elliptic instability in fluids

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• Elliptical instability of compressible flow in ellipsoids
• The combined effect of precession and convection on the dynamo action
• The interactions of the elliptical instability and convection