Rayleigh–Bénard flow for a Carreau fluid in a parallelepiped cavity
Résumé
A continuation method is used to study Rayleigh–Bénard convection in a non-Newtonian fluid inside a parallelepiped cavity. The cavity has its length equal to twice the side of the square cross-section. Shear-thinning and shear-thickening Carreau fluids are considered. The focus is put on the two stable branches which exist in the Newtonian case, a stable primary branch of transverse rolls $B_1$ and a primary branch of longitudinal roll $B_2$ , stabilized beyond a secondary bifurcation point $S_2$ . Although the primary bifurcation points are unchanged, the non-Newtonian properties strongly modify the bifurcation diagram. Indeed, for a shear-thinning fluid, the stable solutions can exist at much smaller Rayleigh numbers ${Ra}$ , on subcritical branches beyond saddle-node points $SN_1$ and $SN_2$ , and small perturbations can be sufficient to reach them. In agreement with Bouteraa et al. ( J. Fluid Mech. , vol. 767, 2015, pp. 696–734), the change of the primary bifurcations from supercritical to subcritical occurs at given values of what they define as the degree of shear-thinning parameter $\alpha$ . Moreover, the value of the Rayleigh number at the saddle-node points can be approximated by a simple expression, as proposed by Jenny et al. ( J. Non-Newtonian Fluid Mech. , vol. 219, 2015, pp. 19–34). In the case of a shear-thickening fluid, the branches remain supercritical, but the secondary point $S_2$ is strongly moved towards larger ${Ra}$ , making it more difficult to reach the longitudinal roll solution. Energy analyses at the bifurcations $SN_1$ , $SN_2$ and $S_2$ show that the changes of the corresponding critical thresholds ${Ra}_c$ are connected with the changes of the viscous properties, but also with changes of the buoyancy effect.
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