Graduate GFD Projects Course

Winter 2001 Course Page  


 

5-8 students meet 2 afternoons/week
Students work on individual projects involving buoyancy, rotation, and waves. Examples of recent projects include convection in a sheared atmospheric boundary layer, internal gravity waves mixing at a sloping boundary, inertial waves, Rossby waves, and baroclinic instability.  All project classes include a popular open house at the end of the term in which students demonstrate their project and help advertise the teaching capabilities of the lab.

Solar Pond. Salinity gradients can trap heat, and the result is a complex diffusion/advection problem. It has a practical application in collecting solar heat.  (N.Ashton) 
                                                                                                                     
                                                                                                     

Rotating Convection.  This is a scale model of about 250 km of subpolar ocean (e.g. Labrador Sea).  The dark disk is cooled and just contacts the upper surface of the fluid in a 1m diameter rotating cylinder.  Fluorescent dye is bled into the cooled region and marks the growing field of turbulent eddies.  Fine-scale convective plumes, about 1/20 the size of the eddies, are embedded in them in the region of cooling.  (Peter Rhines, Boris Boubnov)

Turbulence with rotation.  This beautiful experiment produces large cyclonic eddies from random, 3-dimensional turbulence, which is produced by flow past a small (1 mm diameter) cylinder.  (Cormac Flynn, Eric Lindahl)

A plume (swirling) marked with dye ‘wires’. A quiescent fluid can be ‘wired’ with fluorescein dye lines, and then a dense convective plume started. The dye lines give an articulate picture of entrainment; here the ambient fluid has a slight rotation, which is enhanced as it is drawn into the plume.  (Scott Viers, Christian Parker)