Multiple states and transport properties of double-diffusive convection turbulence
- aState Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;
- bBeijing Innovation Center for Engineering Science and Advanced Technology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;
- cInstitute of Ocean Research, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China;
- dPhysics of Fluids Group, Max Planck Center Twente for Complex Fluid Dynamics and J. M. Burgers Centre for Fluid Mechanics, MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Twente, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands;
- eDipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale, University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” Rome 00133, Italy;
- fMaths Division, Gran Sasso Science Institute, 67100 L’Aquila, Italy;
- gMax Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
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Edited by David A. Weitz, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved May 15, 2020 (received for review March 26, 2020)

Significance
When two different scalars which simultaneously affect the fluid density experience appropriate vertical gradients, double-diffusive turbulence occurs and greatly enhances the mixing. Such process is ubiquitous in nature. In the ocean, DDC has profound influences on the vertical mixing and causes the intriguing thermohaline staircases, namely, a stack of well-mixed convection layers separated by sharp interfaces with very high gradients of mean temperature and salinity. Here we conduct large-scale numerical simulations for such flows in the fingering regime, which is commonly found in the (sub)tropic region. We show that multiple equilibrium states exist in fingering thermohaline staircases with exactly the same background condition and develop scaling laws to describe the fluxes of finger interfaces.
Abstract
When fluid stratification is induced by the vertical gradients of two scalars with different diffusivities, double-diffusive convection (DDC) may occur and play a crucial role in mixing. Such a process exists in many natural and engineering environments. Especially in the ocean, DDC is omnipresent since the seawater density is affected by temperature and salinity. The most intriguing phenomenon caused by DDC is the thermohaline staircase, i.e., a stack of alternating well-mixed convection layers and sharp interfaces with very large gradients in both temperature and salinity. Here we investigate DDC and thermohaline staircases in the salt finger regime, which happens when warm saltier water lies above cold fresher water and is commonly observed in the (sub)tropic regions. By conducting direct numerical simulations over a large range of parameters, we reveal that multiple equilibrium states exist in fingering DDC and staircases even for the same control parameters. Different states can be established from different initial scalar distributions or different evolution histories of the flow parameters. Hysteresis appears during the transition from a staircase to a single salt finger interface. For the same local density ratio, salt finger interfaces in the single-layer state generate very different fluxes compared to those within staircases. However, the salinity flux for all salt finger interfaces follows the same dependence on the salinity Rayleigh number of the layer and can be described by an effective power law scaling. Our findings have direct applications to oceanic thermohaline staircases.
Double-diffusive convection (DDC) refers to the buoyancy-driven convection flows where the fluid density depends on two scalar components. The most relevant terrestrial environment where DDC occurs is the ocean since the density of seawater depends on both temperature and salinity. Pioneered by the seminal work of Stern (1), it is now clear that DDC is ubiquitous in the ocean (2) and crucial to the oceanic mixing (3, 4). One of the most intriguing phenomena induced by DDC is the thermohaline staircase where the vertical mean profiles of temperature and salinity take distinct step-like shapes. Thermohaline staircases are widely observed in oceans (5⇓⇓⇓⇓–10). Moreover, DDC also plays a significant role in many other natural and engineering environments when two different scalar components are involved, such as in astrophysics (11⇓–13), geoscience (14⇓–16), and process technology (17, 18).
Specifically, in the (sub)tropical ocean the mean temperature and salinity decrease with depth in the upper water and DDC is usually in the fingering regime (1, 2), i.e., the flow is driven by an unstable salinity gradient and stabilized by a temperature gradient. The thermohaline staircases in these regions consist of a stack of alternating fully mixed convection layers and sharp interfaces with finger structures. Such staircases have significant impact on the diapycnal mixing (8, 9) and may even attenuate the ocean climate change (19).
By using a salt–sugar system, Krishnamurti successfully produced fingering staircases from initially linear scalar profiles between two tanks with constant concentrations (20, 21). The experiments showed that the global fluxes strongly depend on the specific configuration of the staircases, e.g., the number of convection layers and fingering interfaces. Recently, simulations have shown that in a triply periodic domain, a finger interface can spontaneously break into a robust staircase with two evenly spaced finger interfaces (22).
Key questions in fingering DDC include the flux laws, the formation mechanism of the staircases, and the vertical length scales of the layers. It is common to take the density ratio
Here by large-scale fully resolved direct numerical simulations we reveal striking and unexpected properties of fingering staircases. We employ a multiple-grid code developed in our group, which has been widely used for convection and wall-turbulent flows. We simulate a layer of fluid bounded by two parallel plates which are perpendicular to the direction of gravity. The two plates are nonslip and separated by a height H. Fixed temperature and salinity differences, denoted by
Simulations and experiments showed that for a fluid layer vertically bounded by two plates, once a single finger interface occupies the whole bulk, it does not break into staircases (20, 30). Also inspired by the early experiments where finite-length fingers can grow from a sharp interface between two layers with different temperature and salinity, e.g., see refs. 31⇓–33, in order to achieve the possible staircase state we introduce initially two sharp interfaces at two plates with scalar differences of
Results
Multiple States in Flow Morphology.
We first focus on the flow morphology and the global salinity flux, which are measured by the Nusselt number
Global salinity flux
The change in the flow morphology happens at some critical
The above results show that different final states can be reached by different evolution history of the flow due to the hysteresis of the system. Furthermore, our numerical study shows that different initial conditions can lead to different final states. To demonstrate this, we run simulations at
Multiple states from different initial scalar distributions (A–C) Different staircases at
The statistically stationary states resulting from the three initial conditions are shown in Fig. 2 A–C by the volume rendering of the salinity anomaly
Transport Properties.
The global salinity flux
In Fig. 3 A and B we show the
Transport properties for finger interfaces of type I (red squares) and type II (blue circles). (A) The apparent salinity Nusselt number
It should be pointed out that the effective scaling exponent 0.176 in Fig. 3C is very close to the value found in the salt–sugar experiments, where it is 0.18 to 0.19 (20). However, these values are significantly lower compared to the
Effects of Schmidt Number.
The above findings on the multiple states and the fluxes of fingering staircases provide insights to the thermohaline staircases in the oceans. However, to directly apply our findings to the real ocean observations, the effects of the Schmidt number must be clarified since our 3D simulations use
Parameter spaces and transport of finger interfaces for 2D simulations. (A) Parameter space simulated in 2D simulations, with single-finger layer cases marked by orange squares and staircase cases by green squares. The black arrow indicates the transition
Our results reveal strong similarities for different Schmidt numbers and also between 2D and 3D flows. The transition from the single-layer state to the three-layer staircase always happens when
For
Discussions
The multiple states of the thermohaline staircases presented here are clearly a consequence of the different types of finger interfaces. In our simulations, two finger interfaces can merge into one when the global parameters change. When a single finger interface occupies the whole domain, we never observe its breakup into staircase. Similar phenomena were reported for the vertically bounded salt–sugar DDC flow (20). In fully periodic domain, the single finger interface state is unstable to some horizontally invariant and vertically quasi-periodic modes which cause the appearance of spontaneous layering (22). Such instability mechanism seems not to exist in the vertically bounded configuration. These discrepancies between different flow domains and the hysteresis shown in Fig. 1A suggest that there may exist certain subcritical instability mechanism for the transition from a single finger interface to staircases. Triggering the spontaneous layering from a single finger interface in the bounded domain may require finite-amplitude perturbation or even higher Rayleigh numbers.
Our results reveal that finger interfaces of different types exhibit very different transport properties, even when they have the same local density ratio. The fluxes depend both on the local background mean scalar gradients and on the height of the finger interface, i.e., the local Rayleigh number of the finger interfaces. The local density ratio alone does not seem to be sufficient to describe the fluxes. Modification of the commonly used flux gradient law has been proposed and tested for fully periodic domain (34). Another related open question is what controls the height of the finger interface, especially those within staircases. Many theories have been developed, including a collective instability theory (24) and a recent equilibrium transport model (35). The applicability of those models will be the subject of future studies.
Finally, the current results have direct implications for ocean DDC flows. The existence of the multiple states implies that the exact configuration of the thermohaline staircases is not only determined by the background environment but also related to the evolution history. The global fluxes of the staircases do depend on the exact combinations of convective and fingering layers. However, it is possible to parameterize the fluxes of finger interfaces by involving both the local gradients and the layer thickness, such as was done for the effective scaling laws proposed here. These can be easily tested with the observation data from the ocean.
Materials and Methods
We conduct direct numerical simulations of the DDC flow between two parallel plates which are perpendicular to the direction of gravity. The Oberbeck–Buossinesq approximation is employed; i.e., the fluid density depends linearly on two scalar components. The incompressible Navier–Stokes equation and two advection–diffusion equations for scalars read
The governing equations are numerically solved by a second-order finite-difference scheme with a fraction-time-step method. Particularly, the code employs a double-resolution technique to efficiently deal with the high-Schmidt number scalar component and has been extensively tested for convection turbulence (36). The equations are nondimensionalized by the domain height H, the free fall velocity
The 3D visualization is generated by the open source software VisIt (37). All of the raw data of simulations are stored at the archive facility of the Dutch Supercomputing Consortium SURFsara.
Acknowledgments
Y.Y. and W.C. acknowledge the support from the Major Research Plan of National Natural and Science Foundation of China for Turbulent Structures under Grants 91852107 and 91752202. Y.Y. also acknowledges the partial support from the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Grant XDB42000000. This study is partially supported by Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter and by The Netherlands Center for Multiscale Catalytic Energy Conversion, a Dutch Research Council (NWO) Gravitation program funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the government of The Netherlands. The computing resources are provided by NWO at the Dutch Supercomputing Consortium SURFsara and by Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe at the Italian Supercomputing Consortium Cineca through Project 2019204979.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: yantao.yang{at}pku.edu.cn.
Author contributions: Y.Y., R.V., and D.L. designed research; Y.Y., W.C., R.V., and D.L. performed research; Y.Y., W.C., R.V., and D.L. analyzed data; and Y.Y., W.C., R.V., and D.L. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no competing interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: All of the raw data of simulations are stored at the archive facility of the Dutch Supercomputing Consortium SURFsara, and statistical data used for reproducing Figs. 1, 3, and 4 are available in Datasets S1–S3.
This article contains supporting information online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.2005669117/-/DCSupplemental.
Published under the PNAS license.
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