Experimental study of the flows in a non-axisymmetric ellipsoid under precession

Abstract

Precession driven flows are of great interest for both, industrial and geophysical applications. While cylindrical, spherical and spheroidal geometries have been investigated in great detail, the numerically and theoretically more challenging case of a non-axisymmetric cavity has received less attention. We report experimental results on the flows in a precessing triaxial ellipsoid, with a focus on the base flow of uniform vorticity, which we show to be in good agreement with existing theoretical models. As predicted, the uniform vorticity component exhibits two branches of solutions leading to a hysteresis cycle as a function of the Poincaré number. The first branch is observed at low forcing and characterized by large amplitude of the total fluid rotation and a moderate tilt angle of the fluid rotation axis. In contrast, the second branch displays only a moderate fluid rotation and a large tilt angle of the fluid rotation axis, which tends to align with the precession axis. In addition, we observe the occurrence of parametric instabilities early in the first branch, which saturate in the second branch, where we observe the same order of the kinetic energy in the base flow and instabilities.