Flow organization in highly turbulent thermal convection

Abstract

Recent surprising results on very large Rayleigh-number thermal convection are presented and discussed. For Rayleigh numbers beyond about 1014 the scaling of the Nusselt number as well as the profiles are determined by turbulent boundary layers, though these are extremely thin. The theoretical interpretation is well consistent with the experimental data measured with the high pressure convection facility in Göttingen by Guenter Ahlers et al.