No label defined (Q4936666)

It is known that a motion appears in a nonuniformly heated fluid. Without free boundaries it appears due to thermal (gravitational) convection. In a nonuniformly heated fluid with free boundary, the motion appears due to thermocapillary convection. Under low gravity condition, it is necessary to take into account both these processes. In this article, the influence of these factors on heat fluxes and velocity field formation is studied numerically under non-gravity condition and under an increase in gravity. The authors consider a plane stationary convection with lateral heating, and use the streamfunction-vorticity formulation in Boussinesq approximation in the uniform gravitational field. Computational results show that, for \(\hbox{Ma}\leq 10^2\) and \(\hbox{Ra}=10^4\), the gravitational convection becomes dominant (\(\hbox{Ma}\) is the Marangoni number, \(\hbox{Ra}\) is the Rayleigh number). With increase in gravity, the whole picture of the flow becomes more complex, the convective mixing of the fluid increases, and there appear narrow boundary layers with sharp temperature and velocity gradients close to the hot and cold walls. Starting from \(\hbox{Ra}=10^5\), one observes the formation of secondary flows. For flows without gravity, as the Marangoni number decreases, the flow profiles tend monotonously to the flow at \(\hbox{Ma}=0\). The authors also determine the ranges of dimensionless parameters for which the flow remains unchanged.