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T.M. Rogers (UCSC, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics), G.A. Glatzmaier (UCSC, Department of Earth and Marine Science), S.E. Woosley (UCSC, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics)
High resolution simulations of two-dimensional convection using the Anelastic approximation are presented. These calculations span Rayleigh numbers from 108-1012 for Prandtl number equal to unity. This range covers several decades in the hard turbulent regime. While many studies of this sort have been conducted for the Boussinesq approximation, these are the first to use the Anelastic Approximation in this turbulent regime. We find that the overall behaviour of the fluid is similar to the Boussinesq calculations, with very complex "superplumes" and branching plumes. The flow is dominated by a large scale coherent flow, similar to that seen in experiments. We find a power law exponent for the Nusselt-Rayleigh and Reynolds-Rayleigh number scaling consistent with analytic and experimental results on Boussinesq fluids.
Support for this work was provided by a graduate student fellowship from the National Physical Sciences Consortium and the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program of the DOE, grant number DE-FC02-01ER41176.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: tami@ucolick.org
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.