The temporal development of a model of high Rayleigh number convection

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Abstract
The evolution of a model of the flow in a layer of fluid suddenly heated from below at a Rayleigh number sufficient for a laboratory flow to ultimately become turbulent is investigated with numerical experiments. The numerical study simulates the flow by means of the mean field equations along the lines of Herring's (1963, 1964) pioneering study but uses a different finite difference technique and concentrates attention on the flow development rather than on the final statistically steady state. These solutions are compared with previous and some new simulations in two dimensions. The solutions confirm Herring's work and in addition show that the mean field equations, and in particular the weak-coupling approximations, describe the gross features of the model sufficiently well for the mean field equations to be used with reasonable confidence in evolutionary studies.

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