Realizing the ultimate scaling of the convection turbulence by spatially decoupling the thermal and viscous boundary layers

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the ultimate scaling in turbulent convection can be achieved by spatially decoupling thermal and viscous boundary layers, leading to significant heat flux enhancement and providing evidence for the ultimate state in natural systems.

Contribution

The study shows that fully decoupling thermal and viscous boundary layers inside the turbulent bulk realizes the ultimate scaling in convection.

Findings

Heat flux increases by an order of magnitude.

Ultimate regime is observed when thermal boundary layer is embedded in turbulence.

Provides evidence for the ultimate state in natural convection systems.

Abstract

Turbulent convection plays a crucial role in many natural environments, ranging from Earth ocean, mantle and outer core, to various astrophysical systems. For such flows with extremely strong thermal driving, an ultimate scaling was proposed for the heat flux and velocity. Despite numerous experimental and numerical studies, a conclusive observation of the ultimate regime has not been reached yet. Here we show that the ultimate scaling can be perfectly realized once the thermal boundary layer is fully decoupled from the viscous boundary layer and locates inside the turbulent bulk. The heat flux can be greatly enhanced by one order of magnitude. Our results provide concrete evidences for the appearance of the ultimate state when the entire thermal boundary layer is embedded in the turbulent region, which is probably the case in many natural convection systems.