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Published: 1991

Total Pages: 25

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Numerical simulations and laboratory experiments are used to elucidate aspects of transient natural convection in a magma chamber. The magma chamber is modeled as a horizontal fluid layer confined within an enclosure of square planform and heated from below by a strip heater centered on the lower boundary of the enclosure. The width of the strip heater and the depth of the fluid layer are one-fourth of the layer width. Corn syrup is used as the working fluid in order to approximate the large viscosity variation with temperature and the large Prandtl number typical of magma. The quiescent, uniform, fluid layer is subjected to instantaneous heating from the strip heater producing a transient flow which is dominated by two counter-rotating convective cells. Experimentally determined characteristics of the developing flow are compared with numerical simulations carried out with a finite element computer program. The results of numerical simulations are in essential agreement with experimental data. Differences between the numerical simulations and experimental measurements are conjectured to result from non-ideal effects present in the experiment which are difficult to represent accurately in a numerical simulation.