A multipurpose thermal convection setup to study turbulent super structures

A thermal convection apparatus has been designed to study turbulent super structures at high Rayleigh numbers and Prandtl numbers of the order of unity. This apparatus consists of a rectangular cell with a length of 3.50 m, width of 0.35 m, and variable height, which is fixed at 0.70 m for the present study. This cell is installed inside a 5.6 m long pressure vessel facility, known as Göttingen Uboot, which can be filled with gases (air, helium, nitrogen, or sulfur hexafluoride) at pressures of up to 19 bars, enabling Rayleigh numbers up to Ra ≤ ×1013 and an accessible Prandtl number in the range of 0.7 ≤ Pr ≤ 0.9. The convection cell is bounded vertically by top and bottom plates consisting of a three-layer composite structure in which a thin Lexan plate is sandwiched between highly conductive aluminum plates. This allows for spatially resolved heat flux measurements. Each plate is subdivided into four longitudinal segments that can be independently temperature-controlled to enable homogeneous temperatures and for imposition of horizontal temperature gradients at both the top and bottom boundaries. While the bottom plate is electrically heated, the top plate’s temperature is regulated using temperature-controlled circulating pressurized water. The apparatus is well-suited for precise heat flux measurements, with the results obtained being in good agreement with those previously reported in the literature. Furthermore, the facility enables high-Rayleigh-number experiments on horizontal convection, in which the driving temperature difference is imposed along a horizontal boundary, thereby providing opportunities to investigate a broad range of thermal-convection phenomena.