Boundary zonal flows in rapidly rotating turbulent thermal convection


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Recently, in Zhang et al. (2020), it was found that in rapidly rotating turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection (RBC) in slender cylindrical containers (with diameter-to-height aspect ratio $Gamma=1/2$) filled with a small-Prandtl-number fluid ($Pr approx0.8$), the Large Scale Circulation (LSC) is suppressed and a Boundary Zonal Flow (BZF) develops near the sidewall, characterized by a bimodal PDF of the temperature, cyclonic fluid motion, and anticyclonic drift of the flow pattern (with respect to the rotating frame). This BZF carries a disproportionate amount ($>60%$) of the total heat transport for $Pr < 1$ but decreases rather abruptly for larger $Pr$ to about $35%$. In this work, we show that the BZF is robust and appears in rapidly rotating turbulent RBC in containers of different $Gamma$ and in a broad range of $Pr$ and $Ra$. Direct numerical simulations for $0.1 leq Pr leq 12.3$, $10^7 leq Ra leq 5times10^{9}$, $10^{5} leq 1/Ek leq 10^{7}$ and $Gamma$ = 1/3, 1/2, 3/4, 1 and 2 show that the BZF width $delta_0$ scales with the Rayleigh number $Ra$ and Ekman number $Ek$ as $delta_0/H sim Gamma^{0} Pr^{{-1/4, 0}} Ra^{1/4} Ek^{2/3}$ (${Pr<1, Pr>1}$) and the drift frequency as $omega/Omega sim Gamma^{0} Pr^{-4/3} Ra Ek^{5/3}$, where $H$ is the cell height and $Omega$ the angular rotation rate. The mode number of the BZF is 1 for $Gamma lesssim 1$ and $2 Gamma$ for $Gamma$ = {1,2} independent of $Ra$ and $Pr$. The BZF is quite reminiscent of wall mode states in rotating convection.

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