Influence of a white noise at channel inlet on the parallel and wavy convective instabilities of Poiseuille-Rayleigh-Bénard flows

Abstract

The present paper concerns Poiseuille-Rayleigh-Bénard mixed convection flows in horizontal rectangular air-filled channels of large spanwise aspect ratio (W/H ≥ 10) and it focuses on the primary and secondary thermoconvective instabilities made of steady longitudinal and unsteady wavy rolls for 100 ≤ Re ≤ 200, 3000 < Ra < 15 000, Pr = 0.7, and W/H = 10. Time linear stability analysis of longitudinal rolls and 3D nonlinear numerical simulations using a specially tailored finite difference code is performed for this purpose. A bibliographical review, linear stability analysis and 3D numerical simulations allow establishing the full stability diagram for Re ≤ 300 and Ra ≤ 20 000. The linear stability analysis indicates that the critical Rayleigh number Ra≈*(Re) of the neutral curve between longitudinal and wavy rolls for W/H = 10 is increased at least by a factor of 1.5 in comparison with infinite W/H. The numerical study shows that the usual definitions of growth lengths for longitudinal rolls are inappropriate and it explains the discrepancies observed on wall Nusselt numbers in the literature between experimental and numerical results for the fully developed longitudinal rolls: Nusselt number decreasing at Ra > 8000 is due to spanwise oscillations of thermoconvective rolls that favor a bulk temperature homogenization. Because they are a convective instability, wavy rolls and their space and time development are studied numerically by maintaining at channel inlet, a permanent random excitation: it is designed to cover all the modes and allows detecting the wavy roll modes that are naturally amplified by the flow and those that are damped. Wavy roll patterns are characterized with respect to its three control parameters: Re, the relative distance ɛ to the critical Rayleigh number Ra≈*, and the excitation magnitude Aexc. The growth length of the wavy rolls is shown to correlate with ɛ−0.72 and Log(Aexc). The frequency, wave number, and phase velocity of the most amplified mode, the wall averaged Nusselt number and the spanwise displacements of the wavy rolls are independent of Aexc in the fully developed zone, but depend a lot on ɛ for ɛ < 2 and nearly stabilize for ɛ > 2 (i.e., Ra > 3Ra≈*). Correlation laws as a function of Re, ɛ, and Aexc are proposed for most of the exploited quantities. Numerical simulations performed are in a good agreement with experimental results on the wavy rolls obtained by Pabiou et al. [“Wavy secondary instability of longitudinal rolls in Rayleigh-Bénard-Poiseuille flows,” J. Fluid Mech. 542, 175 (2005)10.1017/S0022112005006154]. Finally, wavy roll characteristics are shown to be potentially interesting to better homogenize the vapor depositions in the horizontal rectangular chemical vapor deposition reactors used to make thin coatings on heated substrates from gaseous components.