Variety of flow patterns in a liquid bridge subjected to a gas stream

Abstract

We present an experimental and two-phase computational study of convection in a liquid bridge ( P r = 14 ) that develops under the action of a parallel gas flow. The study focuses on tracking the evolution of hydrothermal waves by increasing the applied temperature difference Δ T and the temperature of gas moving at the velocity 0.1   m   s − 1 . Our experiments revealed certain regularity in the change of oscillatory states with an increase in the control parameters. Above the instability threshold, the nonlinear dynamics passes through three oscillatory regimes, which are repeated in a somewhat similar way at higher values of the control parameters. They are periodic, quasi-periodic with two or three frequencies and multi-frequency state when the Fourier spectrum is filled with clusters of duplex, triplex or higher numbers of frequencies. Three-dimensional numerical simulation, complemented by a deep spectral analysis, sheds light on the evolution of the flow pattern observed in experiments. The developed methodology identified conditions for the existence of a multi-frequency regime such as the presence of a weak low-frequency mode that can modulate strong high-frequency modes, the existence of strong azimuthal modes with different wavenumbers and the m = 0 mode, and the structured combination of peaks in the Fourier spectrum. This article is part of the theme issue ‘New trends in pattern formation and nonlinear dynamics of extended systems’.