Localized rotating convection with no-slip boundary conditions

Cédric Beaume (1) , Hsien-Ching Kao (1) , Edgar Knobloch (1) , Alain Bergeon (2)

1 Department of Physics [Berkeley]
2 IMFT - Institut de mécanique des fluides de Toulouse

Localized patches of stationary convection embedded in a background conduction state are called convectons. Multiple states of this type have recently been found in two-dimensional Boussinesq convection in a horizontal fluid layer with stress-free boundary conditions at top and bottom, and rotating about the vertical. The convectons differ in their lengths and in the strength of the self-generated shear within which they are embedded, and exhibit slanted snaking. We use homotopic continuation of the boundary conditions to show that similar structures exist in the presence of no-slip boundary conditions at the top and bottom of the layer and show that such structures exhibit standard snaking. The homotopic continuation allows us to study the transformation from slanted snaking characteristic of systems with a conserved quantity, here the zonal momentum, to standard snaking characteristic of systems with no conserved quantity.

Mots clés: Convection; Bifurcation; Localized states

Domaines: Mécanique des fluides [physics.class-ph]; Mécanique des fluides [physics.class-ph]

Cédric Beaume, Hsien-Ching Kao, Edgar Knobloch, Alain Bergeon. Localized rotating convection with no-slip boundary conditions. Physics of Fluids, 2013, vol. 25, pp. 124105-1. ⟨10.1063/1.4843155⟩. ⟨hal-00965835⟩