Hydrodynamic Theory of Convective Transport Across a Dynamically Stabilized Diffuse Boundary Layer.

摘要

The diffuse boundary layer between miscible liquids is subject to Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities if the heavy fluid is supported by the light one. The resulting rapid interchange of the liquids can be suppressed by enforcing vertical oscillations on the whole system. This dynamic stabilization is incomplete and produces some peculiar novel transport phenomena such as decay off the density profile into several steps, periodic peeling of density sheets of the boundary layer and the appearance of steady vortex flow. The theory presented in this paper identifies the basic mechanism as formation of convective cells leading to enhanced diffusion, and explains previous experimental results with water and ZnJ sub 2 -solutions. A nonlinear treatment of the stationary convective flow problem gives the saturation amplitude of the ground mode and provides an upper bound for the maximum convective transport. The hydrodynamic model can be used for visualizing similar transport processes in the plasma of toroidal confinement devices such as sawtooth oscillations in soft disruptions of tokamak discharges and anomalous diffusion by excitation of convective cells. The latter process is investigated here in some detail, leading to the result that the maximum possible transport is of the order of Bohm diffusion. (ERA citation 09:027468)