DOI: 10.1615/ICHMT.1997.IntSymLiqTwoPhaseFlowTranspPhenCHT
ISBN Print: 978-1-56700-115-0
ISSN: 2578-5486
A NUMERICAL STUDY OF THE STABILITY OF SQUARES IN RAYLEIGH-BENARD CONVECTION
RÉSUMÉ
In addition to having many practical thermal engineering applications such as thermal comfort, solidification processes, electronic equipment cooling and earth mantle convection, Rayleigh-Benard convection represents the simplest fluid system which exhibits a sequence of transitions from two-dimensional laminar to more complicated three-dimensional and finally turbulent convection. It has been shown experimentally (White1) and theoretically (Busse & Frick2 and Christensen & Harder3) that square convective patterns become stable when there is variation of viscosity. The term square has been used originally for three-dimensional convective patterns with similar wavelengths in the two horizontal directions, even though this is not the general feature of the squares since they can exist with different horizontal wavelengths. In this paper stability of squares in both infinite and bounded domains is discussed.