First Results From New 3D Spectral Simulations Of Anelastic Turbulent Convection

TL;DR

This paper presents initial results from 3D spectral simulations of anelastic turbulent convection, aiming to understand how turbulent eddies dissipate external shear like tides, with implications for astrophysical phenomena.

Contribution

The authors adapted an existing spectral code to simulate turbulent convection and derived an approximate scaling law for eddy viscosity, validated against solar convective zone models.

Findings

Effective eddy viscosity scales with frequency in agreement with solar models.

Code adaptation successfully simulates turbulent convection with expected behavior.

Results support the use of spectral methods for astrophysical turbulence studies.

Abstract

We have adapted the anelastic spectral code of Barranco & Marcus (2006) to simulate a turbulent convective layer with the intention of studying the effectiveness of turbulent eddies in dissipating external shear (e.g. tides). We derive the anelastic equations, show the time integration scheme we use to evolve these equations and present the tests we ran to confirm that our code does what we expect. Further we apply a perturbative approach to find an approximate scaling of the effective eddy viscosity with frequency, and find that it is in general agreement with an estimate obtained by applying the same procedure to a realistic simulation of the upper layers of the solar convective zone.