Convection: from small plumes to large coherent turbulent structures

In this talk, Professor Rodolfo Ostilla Mónico will describe the efforts made through the years to numerically study two canonical problems of convection: Rayleigh-Benard convection, a fluid heated from below and cooled from above, and the Taylor-Couette flow, the flow between two co-axial cylinders rotating independently. At high Reynolds numbers, these flows generate small-scale plumes which aggregate to form large-scale turbulent coherent structures. These structures have relevance in many applications. Their modelling and control is essential for understanding physical processes such as electro-osmosis, continental drift through the Earth's mantle, atmospheric flow organization as well as in photochemical bio-reactors. We will show variations on the basic problem we are currently studying for engineering and architectural applications, such as windcatchers and wastewater quality detection, as well as hurricane modeling.