Intermittent fluctuations due to Lorentzian pulses in turbulent thermal convection

Abstract

Turbulent motions due to flux-driven thermal convection are investigated by numerical simulations and stochastic modeling. Tilting of convection cells leads to the formation of sheared flows and quasi-periodic relaxation oscillations for the energy integrals far from the threshold for linear instability. The probability density function for the temperature and radial velocity fluctuations in the fluid layer changes from a normal distribution at the onset of turbulence to a distribution with an exponential tail for large fluctuation amplitudes for strongly driven systems. The frequency power spectral density has an exponential shape, which is a signature of deterministic chaos. By use of a novel deconvolution method, this is shown to result from the presence of Lorentzian pulses in the underlying time series, demonstrating that exponential frequency spectra can also persist in turbulent flow regimes.