Physics of Buoyant Flows From Instabilities to Turbulence

About the book

Buoyancy drives fluids everywhere including those in the atmospheres and interiors of planets and stars. Prime examples of such flows are in mantle convection, atmospheres, solar convection, dynamos, heat exchangers, airships and hot air balloons. Buoyancy also brings in extremely rich phenomena including waves and instabilities, patterns, chaos, and turbulence. The book discusses these features in the context of stable and and unstable stratification.

In the book we focus on buoyancy-driven turbulence, both in stably stratified flow and in thermal convection. We discuss the spectral theory including energy flux and show that thermally-driven turbulence is similar to hydrodynamic turbulence. We also describe nonlinear saturation and pattern formation in Rayleigh–Bénard convection, scaling of large-scale quantities like Reynolds and Nusselt numbers, flow anisotropy, and the dynamics of flow structures, namely flow reversals. We extend this analysis to include rotation and magnetic field.

This book presents all the major aspects of the buoyancy-driven flows in a coherent and unified manner that would appeal to advanced graduate students and researchers.

Reviews

The book is an up-to-date account of buoyant flows. It is my fond hope that the book will be successful by inspiring young entrants to this wonderful subject. — Katepalli Sreenivasan

Verma introduces a clear and rigorous mathematical framework for the description of buoyancy driven flows. I highly recommend this book to researchers and post-graduate students. — Franck Plunian

This book give a good combination of basic information on convective instabilities and convective flows, new methods for studying buoyancy driven flows, and recent results. — Peter Frick

The present text by Prof. Mahendra Verma, who is an acknowledged leader in this field, is a very comprehensive account of the large number of issues that are involved. — Jayant Bhattacharjee