Image gallery: rotating plumes

fig04

Figure 1. From left to right: temporally and azimuthally averaged passive scalar volume fraction field for plumes at Ro= $\infty$ , 40, 10 and 1. These results show how increasing the rotation rate from Ro= $\infty$ to 10, results in the plume axis deflection and reduces the lateral intrusion height. At lower Rossby numbers, the lateral transport is completely suppressed leading to a change of regime (see Ro=1 case) characterized by the accumulation of passive scalar in the domain. These results are in agreement with the experiments of Helfrich and Battisti [1].

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Figure 2. Similar to above. The mean circulation is visualized using streamlines colored by azimuthal velocity magnitude. The plume axis deflection accompanied by the blocking of the radial transport increases and the system rotation rate grows. The complete suppression of the radial transport is evident at Ro=1 characterized by the lack of lateral intrusion signature and the presence of smaller eddies that explain the well mixed passive scalar field shown in Fig.1.

[1] Helfrich, K. R. and Battisti, T. M., “Experiments on baroclinic vortex shedding from hydrothermal plumes“, Journal of Geophysical Research, volume 96, pages 12511-12518 (1991).

About Alexandre Fabregat Tomàs

As a postdoctoral fellow at City University of New York, I am interested in everything related with the numerical simulation of heat and mass transport in turbulent flows.

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