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Convective heat transport in stratified atmospheres at low and high Mach number

Evan H. Anders and Benjamin P. Brown

  • Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, University of Colorado–Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA and Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, Boulder, Colorado 80303, USA

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Phys. Rev. Fluids 2, 083501 – Published 29 August, 2017

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.2.083501

Abstract

We study fully compressible convection in the context of plane-parallel, polytropically stratified atmospheres. We perform a suite of two- (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) simulations in which we vary the initial superadiabaticity (ε) and the Rayleigh number (Ra) while fixing the initial density stratification, aspect ratio, and Prandtl number. The evolved heat transport, quantified by the Nusselt number (Nu), follows scaling relationships similar to those found in the well-studied, incompressible Rayleigh-Bénard problem. This scaling holds up in both 2D and 3D and is not appreciably affected by the magnitude of ε.

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Phys. Rev. Fluids 2, 083501– Published 29 August, 2017
  • Received 17 November 2016
  • Revised 3 August 2017
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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