Spiral Defect Turbulence
When you heat water on the stove, the hot water will swell up from the bottom
forming so-called convection patterns.
We are doing experiments
on the fascinating convection roll patterns that you can find if you
heat very thin layers of fluid. The (animated) figure above shows the convecting
pattern in our cell (two sapphire plates surrounding a thin horizontal layer
of pressurized carbon dioxide gas, heated from below and cooled from above).
The fluid flow
is visualized by an optical technique, called shadowgraphy. The cell is viewed
from above. Warm rising fluid defocuses the light and appears dark, while cold falling
fluid focuses the light and appears bright. We call this
spiral defect turbulence.
The research at
Eberhard Bodenschatz, email@example.com