Effect of Prandtl number on heat transport enhancement in Rayleigh-B\'enard convection under geometrical confinement

Abstract

We study, using direct numerical simulations, the effect of geometrical confinement on heat transport and flow structure in Rayleigh-B\'enard convection in fluids with different Prandtl numbers. Our simulations span over two decades of Prandtl number $Pr$, $0.1 \leq Pr \leq 40$, with the Rayleigh number $Ra$ fixed at $10^8$. The width-to-height aspect ratio $\Gamma$ spans between $0.025$ and $0.25$ while the length-to-height aspect ratio is fixed at one. We first find that for $Pr \geq 0.5$, geometrical confinement can lead to a significant enhancement in heat transport as characterized by the Nusselt number $Nu$. For those cases, $Nu$ is maximal at a certain $\Gamma = \Gamma_{opt}$. It is found that $\Gamma_{opt}$ exhibits a power-law relation with $Pr$ as $\Gamma_{opt}=0.11Pr^{-0.06}$, and the maximal relative enhancement generally increases with $Pr$ over the explored parameter range. As opposed to the situation of $Pr \geq 0.5$, confinement-induced enhancement in $Nu$ is not realized for smaller values of $Pr$, such as $0.1$ and $0.2$. The $Pr$ dependence of the heat transport enhancement can be understood in its relation to the coverage area of the thermal plumes over the thermal boundary layer (BL) where larger coverage is observed for larger $Pr$ due to a smaller thermal diffusivity. We further show that $\Gamma_{opt}$ is closely related to the crossing of thermal and momentum BLs, and find that $Nu$ declines sharply when the thickness ratio of the thermal and momentum BLs exceeds a certain value of about one. In addition, through examining the temporally averaged flow fields and 2D mode decomposition, it is found that for smaller $Pr$ the large-scale circulation is robust against the geometrical confinement of the convection cell.