Experiments with liquid metals could not only lead to exciting insights into geophysical and astrophysical flow phenomena, such as atmospheric disturbances at the rim of the sun or the flow in the Earth’s outer core, but also foster industrial applications, for example, the casting of liquid steel.
However, as liquid metals are non-transparent, suitable measurement techniques to visualize the flow in the entire volume are still lacking. A team of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has now, for the first time, obtained a detailed three-dimensional image of a turbulent temperature-driven liquid metal flow using a self-developed method. In the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, they report on the challenges they had to overcome on the way.
Ever since researchers have been investigating the properties of turbulent flows in fluids, they have used an experiment that initially seems quite simple: the fluid is filled into a container/vessel whose base plate is heated and whose lid is cooled at the same time. A team of the Institute of Fluid Dynamics at HZDR is investigating the very details of this process.
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