THERMO/FLUIDS RESEARCH SEMINAR SERIES

"The Role of Boundary Layers in Rotating Convective Heat Transport"

Eric King

UCLA

Friday, 4 December 2009
38-138 Engineering IV
Time: 12:00 pm

Abstract: Heat transport by thermal turbulence has been of interest to the fluid dynamics community for decades. Furthermore, turbulent convective motions are responsible for many of the observed features of planets and stars, such as atmospheric jets and magnetic field generation. In these flows, the influence of background rotation through the Coriolis force is thought to be paramount. I present an examination of the heat transfer behavior of turbulent convection in the rotating Rayleigh-Benard system using a collaborative suite of laboratory experiments and numerical simulations. There exist two separate heat transfer regimes: rapidly rotating and non-rotating. I argue that the heat transfer regime of a given convection system is determined by the competition between the thermal boundary layer and the Ekman boundary layer. This boundary layer control hypothesis permits the formulation of a predictive scaling of the transition between heat transfer regimes, and reconciles a broad array of previously disparate convection studies.

Biosketch: Eric King is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Earth and Space Sciences department at UCLA. He received a Ph.D. in Geophysics and Space Physics at UCLA in 2009, and a B.Sc. in Mathematical Physics from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 2004.

All faculty, teaching assistants, students, and guests are welcome to this event.
(Refreshments will be served)
For more information, please contact Prof. John Kim at jkim@seas.ucla.edu. Phone: (310-825-4393)