Sea Water Freezing Modes in a Natural Convection System ...

• Main Authors: Du, Yihong, Wang, Ziqi, Jiang, Linfeng, Calzavarini, Enrico, Sun, Chao
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: arXiv 2023
• Subjects: Fluid Dynamics physics.flu-dyn; Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics physics.ao-ph; FOS Physical sciences; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2303.01945; https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01945

Sea ice is crucial in many natural processes and human activities. Understanding the dynamical couplings between the inception, growth and equilibrium of sea ice and the rich fluid mechanical processes occurring at its interface and interior is of relevance in many domains ranging from geophysics to marine engineering. Here we experimentally investigate the complete freezing process of water with dissolved salt in a standard natural convection system, i.e., the prototypical Rayleigh-Bénard cell. Due to the presence of a mushy phase, the studied system is considerably more complex than the freezing of freshwater in the same conditions (Wang et al. 2021c). We measure the ice thickness and porosity at the dynamical equilibrium state for different initial salinities of the solution and temperature gaps across the cell. These observables are non-trivially related to the controlling parameters of the system as they depend on the heat transport mode across the cell. We identify in the experiments 5 out of the 6 ... : 20 pages, 6 figures ...