Flow reconstruction in a Rayleigh-Bénard convection cell with an aspect ratio 0.5 by contactless inductive flow tomography

Abstract

The time dependent behaviour of the large-scale circulation in a Rayleigh-Bénard convection cell exhibits a rich set of different three-dimensional flow features like rotations or torsional modes. In this paper, the applicability of contactless inductive flow tomography to visualise these flow features in a cylindrical cell filled with GaInSn is investigated numerically. The simulated flow in the cylinder with a diameter of 320 mm and a height of 640 mm serves as a basis to investigate the quality of the reconstructed velocity field by contactless inductive flow tomography. Figs 5, Refs 9.