Rare fluctuations and large-scale circulation cessations in turbulent convection

Abstract

In turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection, a large-scale circulation (LSC) develops in a nearly vertical plane, and is maintained by rising and falling plumes detaching from the unstable thermal boundary layers. Rare but large fluctuations in the LSC amplitude can lead to extinction of the LSC (a cessation event), followed by the re-emergence of another LSC with a different (random) azimuthal orientation. We extend previous models of the LSC dynamics to include momentum and thermal diffusion in the azimuthal plane, and calculate the tails of the probability distributions of both the amplitude and azimuthal angle. Our analytical results are in very good agreement with experimental data.

References in corpus (6)

• Large scale dynamics in turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection
• Rotations and cessations of the large-scale circulation in turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection
• Origin of the Temperature Oscillation in Turbulent Thermal Convection
• The cause of oscillations of the large-scale circulation of turbulent Rayleigh-B{é}nard convection
• Spectral theory of metastability and extinction in birth-death systems
• A model of diffusion in a potential well for the dynamics of the large-scale circulation in turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Elliptical Instability and Multi-Roll Flow Modes of the Large-scale Circulation in Confined Turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard Convection
• A low-dimensional model predicting geometry-dependent dynamics of large-scale coherent structures in turbulence
• Effect of tilting on turbulent convection: Cylindrical samples with aspect ratio $\Gamma =0.50$
• Low-dimensional model of the large-scale circulation of turbulent Rayleigh-B{é}nard convection in a cubic container
• Enhanced azimuthal rotation of the large-scale flow through stochastic cessations in turbulent rotating convection with large Rossby numbers
• Oscillatory large-scale circulation in liquid-metal thermal convection and its structural unit
• Effects of tilt on the orientation dynamics of the large-scale circulation in turbulent Rayleigh-B{é}nard convection
• Effect of weak rotation on large-scale circulation cessations in turbulent convection