Teaching: Thermal convection

Thermal convection in 2-D movies

The following movies show thermal convection in the infinite Prandl number, laminar flow limit as appropriate for the Earth's mantle. The movies were produced for educational purposes with the finite element code ConMan by Scott King, and the finite difference code FDCON by Harro Schmeling

Isoviscous models

The aspect ratio of the computational domain is four (4 x 1 , 2D), there is no internal heating, fixed thermal boundary conditions on the top and bottom (heating from below) and free slip along the boundaries.

The time you see in the title is in nodimensional units and has to be multiplied by the conductive timescale for real times.

• Rayleigh number 10^6
  Quicktime movie (940kB). Note how an initial disturbance evolves into stable convection cells and the conductive temperature profile changes. At the end, the system has reached quasi steady-state.
  
  
• Rayleigh number 10^7, initial condition 1
  Quicktime movie (2.7MB). Starting from a disturbance, an apparently stable configuration with higher wavelength than for Ra=10^6 develops. It is only temporarily stable, however, as can be seen later when the time-dependence takes over.
  
  
• Rayleigh number 10^7, initial condition 2
  Quicktime movie (900kB). The same model as above develops into time-dependence right away from different initial conditions.

Temperature dependent convection

Subduction

• MPG movie for homogenous upper mantle
• MPG movie for higher viscosity lower mantle

Other links