Compressible turbulent convection at very high Rayleigh numbers

Abstract

Heat transport in highly turbulent convection is not well understood. In this paper, we simulate compressible convection in a box of aspect ratio 4 using computationally-efficient MacCormack-TVD finite difference method on single and multi-GPUs, and reach very high Rayleigh number ($\mathrm{Ra}$) -- $10^{15}$ in two dimensions and $10^{11}$ in three dimensions. We show that the Nusselt number $\mathrm{Nu} \propto \mathrm{Ra}^{0.3}$ (classical scaling) that differs strongly from the ultimate-regime scaling, which is $\mathrm{Nu} \propto \mathrm{Ra}^{1/2}$. The bulk temperature drops adiabatically along the vertical even for high $\mathrm{Ra}$, which is in contrast to the constant bulk temperature in Rayleigh-B\'{e}nard convection (RBC). Unlike RBC, the density decreases with height. In addition, the vertical pressure-gradient ($-dp/dz$) nearly matches the buoyancy term ($\rho g$). But, the difference, $-dp/dz-\rho g$, is equal to the nonlinear term that leads to Reynolds number $\mathrm{Re} \propto \mathrm{Ra}^{1/2}$.