Hydrothermal Waves in a Disk of Fluid

Abstract

Rayleigh-Benard and Benard-Marangoni instabilities have been studied for roughly a century and have served as prototypes for the transition to temporal chaos as well as spatio-temporal chaos of an initially. Using the Marangoni effect [1, 2] with a horizontal temperature gradient to drive the system out of equilibrium, one can observe propagating wave instabilities: hydrothermal waves [3]. This chapter presents different instability regimes of thermocapillary flows in extended geometry, focusing on propagating waves. We first introduce thermocapillary flows, and give some indications about physical effects involved. We then review experimental results in cylindrical geometry and illustrate how rich those systems are.