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Convection in 3He–superfluid-4He mixtures. Part 2. A survey of instabilities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2006

Guy Metcalfe  and
R. P. Behringer
Guy Metcalfe
Affiliation:
Division of Building, Construction and Engineering, CSIRO, Highett 3190, Australia
R. P. Behringer
Affiliation:
Duke University Department of Physics and Center for Nonlinear and Complex Systems, Durham, NC 27708, USA
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Abstract

Dilute mixtures of 3He in superfluid 4He have Prandtl numbers easily tunable between those of liquid metals and water: 0.04 < Pr < 2. Moreover, superfluid mixture convection is closely analogous to classical Rayleigh–Bénard convection, i.e. superfluid mixtures convect as if they were classical, single-component fluids. This work has two goals. The first, accomplished in Part 1, is to experimentally validate the superfluid mixture convection analogue to Rayleigh–Bénard convection.

With superfluid effects understood and under control, the second goal is to identify and characterize time-dependence and chaos and to discover new dynamical behaviour in strongly nonlinear convective flows. In this paper, Part 2, we exploit the unique Pr range of superfluid mixtures and the variable aspect ratio (Γ) capabilities of our experiment to survey convective instabilities in the broad, and heretofore largely unexplored, parameter space 0.12 < Pr < 1.4 and 2 < Γ < 95. Within this large parameter space, we have focused on small to moderate Γ and Pr and on large Γ with Pr ≈ 1. The novel behaviour uncovered in the survey includes the following. Changing attractors: at Γ = 6.0 and Pr = 0.3, we observe intermittent bursting destabilizing a fully developed chaotic state. Above the onset of bursting the average length of a burst-free interval and the average length of a burst vary as power laws. At Γ = 4.25 and Pr = 0.12 we observe a particularly novel reversible switching transition involving two chaotic attractors. Instability competition: near the codimension-2 point at the crossing of the skewed-varicose and oscillatory instabilities we find that the effects of instability competition greatly increase the complexity and multiplicity of states. A heat-pulse method allows selection of the active state. Decreasing Γ suppresses the available complexity. Superfluid turbulence: we find that the large-amplitude noisy states, previously believed due to superfluid turbulence, are confined to small values of Γ and Pr and are not consistent with superfluid turbulence. Changing instabilities: at Pr = 0.19 a wavevector detuning changes the type of secondary instability from oscillatory to saddle-node, with an unusual 3/4 exponent time scaling. Very large Γ: at Pr = 1.3 for Γ increasing from 44 to 90, we observe the onset of convection changing from ordered and stationary to disordered and time-dependent. At the beginning of the crossover there are hysteretic transitions to coherent oscillations close to the onset of convection. By the end of the crossover convection is time-dependent and irregular at onset with the fluctuation amplitude correlated with the mean Nusselt number.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 307 , 25 January 1996 , pp. 297 - 331
Copyright
© 1996 Cambridge University Press

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