Researchers have made an incredible discovery about a type of turbulence, and it helps explain why certain liquids move like they do on our planet.
The findings are explained in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and involve some special swirling that takes place when something is heated from underneath. This phenomenon is called turbulent convection.
Jun Zhang, a professor from New York University and NYU Shanghai, and Kaizhe Wang, a researcher in the university’s Physics Department, did an experiment. It was about movement between something moving around freely and warm air moving up or down. Specifically, they studied Rayleigh–Bénard convection—a type of convection caused by temperature differences.
Researchers at the Joint Research Institute of NYU Shanghai conducted experiments with a big cylinder filled with water. They heated the bottom of the cylinder until it created moving currents (turbulent flows). Then, they had a solid object (a rectangular panel) float inside the cylinder so that they could examine how these currents affect solid objects in general.
According to Zhang, the system was surprisingly stable. The team observed that the turbulent convection-powered flows and solid particles could rotate in two directions – one clockwise and the other counterclockwise. Additionally, the speed of rotation increased according to how strong the convection was. Turbulence can also cause changes in which direction it is rotating in.
Scientists have been studying and researching how the Earth’s inner core rotates when it comes into contact with a liquid core. This research proves that turbulence can be stabilized by objects, which also means that the heat within our planet plays a very important role.
This passage is all about an experiment that Kaizhe Wang and Jun Zhang carried out in May 2023. They studied the way a free body moves when placed in large-scale thermal convection, and published their research findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
