They used a liquid-metal alloy composed of gallium, indium, and tin, which was placed in a vertical cylindrical cell between two plates and then heated from below and cooled from above. The new findings could help researchers develop sophisticated models of the dynamo in Earth’s interior, design more efficient renewable liquid-metal batteries, and improve the design of nuclear fusion vessels.įelix Schindler of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Germany, and colleagues performed experiments on so-called Rayleigh-Bérnard convection, which is relevant to numerous heat transfer phenomena. Such a decrease in the heat transport is unpredicted by any existing theories. These experiments reveal that a liquid metal driven vigorously by buoyancy exhibits a flow transition at high turbulence intensities to a highly volatile state with lower heat transport efficiency (Fig. Temperature-induced liquid-metal flows, such as the molten-metal flows of Earth’s inner core, show surprising thermal properties, according to new experiments. Both the temperature distribution and the flow orientations near the plates vary sharply in time, resulting in an incoherent flow across the cylinder and decreased heat transfer. The (right) arrows correspond to the instantaneous orientations of the large-scale flow near the bottom and top plates. The snapshot shows a cylinder with an aspect ratio of one half.

Figure 1: Snapshot of the (left) velocity and (right) temperature measurements made by Schindler and his colleagues of a turbulent liquid metal at a very high convection strength.

Liquid metal