Verma M. Physics of Buoyant Flows: From Instabilities to Turbulence

World Scientific Publishing, 2018. — 340 p. — ISBN: 978-981-3237-79-7.Gravity pervades the whole universe; hence buoyancy drives fluids everywhere including those in the atmospheres and interiors of planets and stars. Prime examples of such flows are mantle convection, atmospheric flows, solar convection, dynamo process, heat exchangers, airships and hot air balloons. In this book we present fundamentals and applications of thermal convection and stratified flows.Buoyancy brings in extremely rich phenomena including waves and instabilities, patterns, chaos, and turbulence. In this book we present these topics in a systematic manner. First we present a unified treatment of linear theory that yields waves and thermal instability for stably and unstably-stratified flows respectively. We extend this analysis to include rotation and magnetic field. We also describe nonlinear saturation and pattern formation in Rayleigh–Benard convection.The second half of the book is dedicated to buoyancy-driven turbulence, both in stably-stratified flow and in thermal convection. We describe the spectral theory including energy flux and show that the thermally-driven turbulence is similar to hydrodynamic turbulence. We also describe large-scale quantities like Reynolds and Nusselt numbers, flow anisotropy, and the dynamics of flow structures, namely flow reversals. Thus, this book presents all the major aspects of the buoyancy-driven flows in a coherent manner that would appeal to advanced graduate students and researchers.Basic Formulation, Patterns, and ChaosBasic Framework
Fourier Space Description
Energy Transfers in Buoyancy-Driven Flows
Waves in Stably-Stratified Flows
Instability in Thermal Convection
Nonlinear Saturation
Patterns and Chaos in Buoyancy-Driven Flows
Boundary Layer, Bulk, and Exact Relations in Thermal Convection
Turbulent Buoyant Flows
A Survey of Hydrodynamic Turbulence
Scaling of Large-Scale Quantities in RBC
Phenomenology of Stably Stratified TurbulenceC
Phenomenology for Turbulent Thermal Convection
Turbulence Phenomenology of Other Buoyancy-Driven Flows
Anisotropy in Thermally-Driven Turbulence
Shell Models for Buoyancy-Driven Turbulence
Structures and Flow Reversals in RBC
Turbulence Phenomenology for RBC
Buoyant Flows with Rotation and Magnetic Field:
Rotating Flows
Buoyant and Rotating Flows
Magnetohydrodynamics and Rotating Flows
Buoyant Flows Under Magnetic Field
Buoyant and Rotating Flows Under Magnetic Field
Double Diffusive Convection
Conclusions
Appendices
Thermal Parameters of Common Fluids
Phase and Group Velocities of a Wave Packet
Buoyant and Rotating Flows Under Magnetic Field
Proper Orthogonal Decomposition of RBCTrue PDF