Scaling regimes in rapidly rotating thermal convection at extreme Rayleigh numbers

TL;DR

This paper uses direct numerical simulations to explore the scaling laws of heat transport in rapidly rotating thermal convection at extreme Rayleigh numbers, revealing diffusion-free regimes and transitions between different geostrophic turbulence regimes.

Contribution

The study provides the first direct numerical evidence of diffusion-free scaling laws and regime transitions in rapidly rotating convection at extremely high Rayleigh numbers.

Findings

Convective heat transport scales as Nu-1 ∝ ṪRa^{3/2} in the diffusion-free regime.

A transition occurs to a regime where Nu-1 ∝ ṪRa^{3}.

DNS confirms the theoretical scaling relations at extreme parameters.

Abstract

The geostrophic turbulence in rapidly rotating thermal convection exhibits characteristics shared by many highly turbulent geophysical and astrophysical flows. In this regime, the convective length and velocity scales, heat flux, and kinetic and thermal dissipation rates are all diffusion-free, meaning that they are independent of the viscosity and thermal diffusivity. Our direct numerical simulations (DNS) of rotating Rayleigh--B\'enard convection in domains with no-slip top and bottom and periodic lateral boundary conditions for a fluid with the Prandtl number $Pr=1$ and extreme buoyancy and rotation parameters (the Rayleigh number up to $Ra=3\times10^{13}$ and the Ekman number down to $Ek=5\times10^{-9}$) indeed demonstrate these diffusion-free scaling relations, in particular, that the dimensionless convective heat transport scales with the supercriticality parameter $\widetilde{Ra}\equiv Ra\,Ek^{4/3}$ as $Nu-1\propto \widetilde{Ra}^{3/2}$, where $Nu$ is the Nusselt number. We further derive and verify in the DNS that with the decreasing $\widetilde{Ra}$ the geostrophic turbulence regime undergoes a transition into another geostrophic regime where the convective heat transport scales as $Nu-1\propto \widetilde{Ra}^{3}$.