Summary: RAYLEIGH-B´ENARD CONVECTION WITH ROTATION AT
SMALL PRANDTL NUMBERS
Guenter Ahlers and Kapil M. S. Bajaj
Department of Physics and Center for Nonlinear Science
University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA
Abstract
This paper reviews results from and future prospects for experimental
studies of Rayleigh-B´enard convection with rotation about a vertical axis.
At dimensionless rotation rates 0 20 and for Prandtl numbers
1, K¨uppers-Lortz-unstable patterns offered a unique opportunity to
study spatio-temporal chaos immediately above a supercritical bifurcation
where weakly-nonlinear theories in the form of Ginzburg-Landau (GL) or
Swift-Hohenberg (SH) equations can be expected to be valid. However,
the dependence of the time and length scales of the chaotic state on
T/Tc -1 was found to be different from the expected dependence based
on the structure of GL equations. For >
70 and 0.7 <
<
5 patterns
were found to be cellular near onset with local four-fold coordination.

Source: Ahlers, Guenter - Department of Physics, University of California at Santa Barbara

Collections: Physics