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Updated: Jul 25, 2026

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Applicability of Taylor's hypothesis in thermally driven turbulence
Abhishek Kumar1, Mahendra K Verma2
1Applied Mathematics Research Centre, Coventry University, Coventry CV1 5FB, UK.
Abstract:
In this paper, we show that, in the presence of large-scale circulation (LSC), Taylor's hypothesis can be invoked to deduce the energy spectrum in thermal convection using real-space probes, a popular experimental tool. We perform numerical simulation of turbulent convection in a cube and observe that the velocity field follows Kolmogorov's spectrum (k-5/3). We also record the velocity time series using real-space probes near the lateral walls. The corresponding frequency spectrum exhibits Kolmogorov's spectrum (f-5/3), thus validating Taylor's hypothesis with the steady LSC playing the role of a mean velocity field. The aforementioned findings based on real-space probes provide valuable inputs for experimental measurements used for studying the spectrum of convective turbulence.
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