Experimental study of liquid movement in free elementary convective cells

Abstract

Elementary convection cells (ECC) are formed in horizontal layers of liquid heated from below, and they are experimentally investigated in this work. Results of experimental studies were adequately described by the theoretical model of ECC. It is shown that the addition of aluminum powder to oil transforms oil to a suspension, such that boundary conditions on the solid wall can be regarded as free because there is a slip through the tape of pure oil. Change in the character of boundary conditions is confirmed by the results of numerical processing of experimental results on formation of convective rings on the layer surface by other authors. Two independent methods for determining the velocity of mass transfer in cells with various diameters are described in the article. For cells with a large diameter (17 mm), the maximum velocity of mass transfer was measured at the upper boundary on a deflection angle of the probe. Measured in this way velocity was equal to V_Oil ≈ 0.2 mm/sec. For cells with a smaller diameter (2 mm), the velocity of oil on the surface of a cell was measured using an optical method and constituted the value from 3.5 mm/s to 5.2 mm/s.