Abstract
This article presents an experimental set-up to study the turbulent regime of free thermal convection in a Rayleigh-Bénard cell. Helium gas around 4 K is confined in a cell of aspect ratio 0.5. With a thermocouple technique we can measure temperature differences across the cell as low as 0.2 mK, which allows to test the adiabatic gradient effect. Covering a large range of Rayleigh numbers (103 to 5 × 1012), Nusselt numbers from 1 to 103 are obtained. The results are compared with previous works. They show a departure from the 2/7 power law above Ra = 3 × 1010.
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Chavanne, X., Chillà, F., Chabaud, B. et al. High rayleigh number convection with gaseous helium at low temperature. J Low Temp Phys 104, 109–129 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00754092
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00754092