The Göttingen rotating turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection facility

etc15 Tracking Number 282

Thermally driven turbulent convection under the influence of global rotation is ubiquitous in nature. Well known examples are the outer convective shell of our Sun and the outer liquid core of the Earth. Trying to understand the underlying dynamics of such flows is highly challenging, not only because of the enormous range in length- and time-scales that are involved with these geo/astrophysical cases and the complex interaction of hydrodynamics with electromagnetism, but also because direct measurements on these systems are most often impossible to carry out. We gain access to direct measurements by isolating part of the problem: We focus solely on the hydrodynamical aspects of turbulent convection by performing experiments in the lab and making comparisons with direct numerical simulations (DNS). The canonical system that we use to study such flows is Rayleigh-B\'enard convection (RBC), the flow between a warm bottom plate and cold top plate, in a fluid-filled upright cylindrical cell that is rotating around its geometrical axis. This presentation will focus on the newly constructed rotating RBC facility at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS) in G\"ottingen.