Stability of thermal convection in two superimposed miscible viscous fluids

Abstract

The stability of two-layer thermal convection in high-Prandtl-number fluids is investigated using laboratory experiments and marginal stability analysis. The two fluids have different densities and viscosities but there is no surface tension and chemical diffusion at the interface is so slow that it is negligible. The density stratification is stable. A wide range of viscosity and layer depth ratios is studied. The onset of convection can be either stationary or oscillatory depending on the buoyancy number B, the ratio of the stabilizing chemical density anomaly to the destabilizing thermal density anomaly: when B is lower than a critical value (a function of the viscosity and layer depth ratios), the oscillatory regime develops, with a deformed interface and convective patterns oscillating over the whole tank depth; when B is larger than this critical value, the stratified regime develops, with a flat interface and layers convecting separately. Experiments agree well with the marginal stability results. At low Rayleigh number, characteristic time and length scales are well-predicted by the linear theory. At higher Rayleigh number, the linear theory still determines which convective regime will start first, using local values of the Rayleigh and buoyancy numbers, and which regime will persist, using global values of these parameters.