The effect of rotation on oscillatory double-diffusive convection (semiconvection)

TL;DR

This paper investigates how rotation influences oscillatory double-diffusive convection, revealing that rotation can suppress transport and alter layering, with effects depending on the rotation strength and axis orientation.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of rotation effects on the linear stability and layered structures of oscillatory double-diffusive convection.

Findings

Weak rotation behaves similarly to non-rotating systems

Strong rotation leads to vortex-dominated dynamics

Rotation reduces heat and chemical transport when layers form

Abstract

Oscillatory double-diffusive convection (ODDC, more traditionally called semiconvection) is a form of linear double-diffusive instability that occurs in fluids that are unstably stratified in temperature (Schwarzschild unstable), but stably stratified in chemical composition (Ledoux stable). This scenario is thought to be quite common in the interiors of stars and giant planets, and understanding the transport of heat and chemical species by ODDC is of great importance to stellar and planetary evolution models. Fluids unstable to ODDC have a tendency to form convective thermo-compositional layers which significantly enhance the fluxes of temperature and chemical composition compared with microscopic diffusion. Although a number of recent studies have focused on studying properties of both layered and non-layered ODDC, few have addressed how additional physical processes such as global rotation affect its dynamics. In this work we study first how rotation affects the linear stability properties of rotating ODDC. Using direct numerical simulations we then analyze the effect of rotation on properties of layered and non-layered ODDC, and study how the angle of the rotation axis with respect to the direction of gravity affects layering. We find that rotating systems can be broadly grouped into two categories, based on the strength of rotation. Qualitative behavior in the more weakly rotating group is similar to non-rotating ODDC, but strongly rotating systems become dominated by vortices that are invariant in the direction of the rotation vector and strongly influence transport. We find that whenever layers form, rotation always acts to reduce thermal and compositional transport.