Small Reynolds Number Convection in Rotating Spherical Annuli

Abstract

A fourth order regular perturbation expansion in powers of the Reynolds number is used to investigate the steady convection of a stratified Boussinesq fluid in rotating spherical annuli. The results include the primary and secondary flow patterns, temperature distributions, total heat flux, and torque characteristics emphasizing their dependence on a wide range of radius and angular velocity ratios. Maximum usable Reynolds numbers were found and usually were larger than 10. The optimum configuration for convective heat transfer is a radius ratio of 0.35 and an angular velocity ratio of +1/3. This same configuration gives the largest torque as well.