Energy spectra and fluxes for Rayleigh-Bénard convection

Abstract

We compute the spectra and fluxes of the velocity and temperature fields in Rayleigh-Bénard convection in turbulent regime for a wide range of Prandtl numbers using pseudospectral simulations on 512(3) grids. Our spectral and flux results support the Kolmogorov-Obukhov (KO) scaling for zero Prandtl number and low Prandtl number (P=0.02) convection. The KO scaling for the velocity field in zero-Prandtl number and low-Prandtl number convection is because of the weak buoyancy in the inertial range (buoyancy is active only at the very low wave numbers). We also observe that for intermediate Prandtl numbers (P=0.2) the KO scaling fits better with the numerical results than the Bolgiano-Obukhov (BO) scaling. For large Prandtl number (P=6.8) , the spectra and flux results are somewhat inconclusive on the validity of the KO or BO scaling, yet the BO scaling is preferred over the KO scaling for these cases. The numerical results for P=1 is rather inconclusive.