# Flow organization and heat transfer in turbulent wall sheared thermal convection

## TL;DR

This study uses direct numerical simulations to explore how wall shear influences flow organization and heat transfer in turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection across different regimes, revealing transitions from buoyancy to shear dominance.

## Contribution

It identifies three distinct flow regimes in wall-sheared thermal convection and characterizes their flow structures and heat transfer scaling behaviors.

## Key findings

- Heat transfer decreases then increases with shear at fixed Ra.
- Flow transitions from buoyancy-driven to shear-dominated structures.
- Nusselt number scaling varies across regimes, with different exponents.

## Abstract

We perform direct numerical simulations of wall sheared Rayleigh-B\'enard (RB) convection for Rayleigh numbers up to $Ra=10^8$, Prandtl number unity, and wall shear Reynolds numbers up to $Re_w=10000$. Using the Monin-Obukhov length $L_{MO}$ we identify three different flow states, a buoyancy dominated regime ($L_{MO} \lesssim \lambda_{\theta}$; with $\lambda_{\theta}$ the thermal boundary layer thickness), a transitional regime ($0.5H \gtrsim L_{MO} \gtrsim \lambda_{\theta}$; with $H$ the height of the domain), and a shear dominated regime ($L_{MO} \gtrsim 0.5H$). In the buoyancy dominated regime the flow dynamics are similar to that of turbulent thermal convection. The transitional regime is characterized by rolls that are increasingly elongated with increasing shear. The flow in the shear dominated regime consists of very large-scale meandering rolls, similar to the ones found in conventional Couette flow. As a consequence of these different flow regimes, for fixed $Ra$ and with increasing shear, the heat transfer first decreases, due to the breakup of the thermal rolls, and then increases at the beginning of the shear dominated regime. For $L_{MO} \gtrsim 0.5H$ the Nusselt number $Nu$ effectively scales as $Nu \sim Ra^{\alpha}$, with $\alpha \ll 1/3$ while we find $\alpha \simeq 0.31$ in the buoyancy dominated regime. In the transitional regime the effective scaling exponent is $\alpha > 1/3$, but the temperature and velocity profiles in this regime are not logarithmic yet, thus indicating transient dynamics and not the ultimate regime of thermal convection.