Abstract
The Prandtl and Rayleigh number dependences of the Reynolds number in turbulent thermal convection following from the unifying theory by Grossmann and Lohse [J. Fluid Mech. 407, 27 (2000); Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 3316 (2001)] are presented and compared with various recent experimental findings. This dependence Re(Ra,Pr) is more complicated than a simple global power law. For and the effective or local power law exponent of as a function of is definitely less than namely, in agreement with Qiu and Tong’s experimental findings [Phys. Rev. E 64, 036304 (2001)]. We also calculated the kinetic boundary layer width. Both in magnitude and in Ra scaling it is consistent with the data.
- Received 5 March 2002
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.66.016305
©2002 American Physical Society