Experimental study of convection of a binary fluid in a quasi-1-dimensional cell

Liu, Ming-hui (1992) Experimental study of convection of a binary fluid in a quasi-1-dimensional cell. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

[English] PDF (Migrated (PDF/A Conversion) from original format: (application/pdf)) - Accepted Version Available under License - The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission. Download (9MB) [English] PDF - Accepted Version Available under License - The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission. (Original Version)

Abstract

Rayleigh-Bénard convection in binary fluids has been studied widely in recent years due to the richness of instability phenomena observed. With properly chosen parameters, the first, bifurcation from conduction to convection can be to a traveling wave (TW) state, and there is then a second transition from the TW state to a stationary overturning convection (SOC) state. In this thesis, we report on an experimental study of TW and SOC states in ethanol-water mixtures in a narrow rectangular cell. The flow is visualized using the shadowgraph technique. By comparing our recorded shadowgraph intensity profiles with recent numerical results [13], we studied the temperature and concentration fields in the convective flow, both in the TW and SOC states. While our results confirm some of the qualitative features of the numerical results, there appear to be some significant differences which may be due partly to the narrow geometry of the experimental cell.

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