Title: Thermally driven turbulence.
Speaker: Prof. Detlef Lohse (University of Twente)

Abstract:Thermally driven turbulence is one of the classical problems in fluid dynamics. The great interest into this problem originates from the relevance of thermal turbulence in meteorology, geophysics, oceanograpy, and astrophysics: The weather in the atmosphere is driven by thermal convection, convection transports the heat of the earth's interior to its surface, convection drives currents in the ocean.
In the last years we have developed a unifying theory for convection in a closed container which is called Rayleigh-Benard convection. We calculate the heat transfer and the degree of turbulence from the underlying fluid dynamical equations, as a function of the temperature difference and the material properties. This theory is based on a decomposition of the energy dissipation and the thermal dissipation into a bulk and a boundary layer contribution, and can account for various recent and often surprising experimental results.