We perform a numerical study of the heat transfer and flow structure of Rayleigh-Benard (RB) convection in (in most cases regular) porous media, which are comprised of circular, solid obstacles located on a square lattice. This study is focused on the role of porosity in the flow properties during the transition process from the traditional RB convection with (so no obstacles included) to Darcy-type porous-media convection with approaching 0. Simulations are carried out in a cell with unity aspect ratio, for Rayleigh number from to and varying porosities , at a fixed Prandtl number , and we restrict ourselves to the two-dimensional case. For fixed , the Nusselt number is found to vary non-monotonically as a function of ; namely, with decreasing , it first increases, before it decreases for approaching 0. The non-monotonic behaviour of originates from two competing effects of the porous structure on the heat transfer. On the one hand, the flow coherence is enhanced in the porous media, which is beneficial for the heat transfer. On the other hand, the convection is slowed down by the enhanced resistance due to the porous structure, leading to heat transfer reduction. For fixed , depending on , two different heat transfer regimes are identified, with different effective power-law behaviours of versus , namely a steep one for low when viscosity dominates, and the standard classical one for large . The scaling crossover occurs when the thermal boundary layer thickness and the pore scale are comparable. The influences of the porous structure on the temperature and velocity fluctuations, convective heat flux and energy dissipation rates are analysed, further demonstrating the competing effects of the porous structure to enhance or reduce the heat transfer.

In this paper, we are concerned with the motion of electrically conducting fluid governed by the two-dimensional non-isentropic viscous compressible MHD system on the half plane with no-slip condition on the velocity field, perfectly conducting wall condition on the magnetic field and Dirichlet boundary condition on the temperature on the boundary. When the viscosity, heat conductivity and magnetic diffusivity coefficients tend to zero in the same rate, there is a boundary layer which is described by a Prandtl-type system. Under the non-degeneracy condition on the tangential magnetic field instead of monotonicity of velocity, by applying a coordinate transformation in terms of the stream function of magnetic field as motivated by the recent work [27], we obtain the local-in-time well-posedness of the boundary layer system in weighted Sobolev spaces.

In this paper, we will survey some recent results on the study of the viscous and invisid compressible flow with vacuum. It is wellknown that the study on vacuum has significance in the investigation on some important physical phenomena. However, most of the important questions about vacuum are still open due to the singularities caused by vacuum which need new mathematical tools and techniques to handle.

We report on a three-dimensional direct numerical simulation study of flow structure and heat transport in the annular centrifugal Rayleigh-Bdnard convection (ACRBC) system, with cold inner and hot outer cylinders corotating axially, for the Rayleigh number range Ra is an element of [10(6), 10(8)] and radius ratio range eta = R-i/R-o is an element of [0.3, 0.9] (R-i and R-o are the radius of the inner and outer cylinders, respectively). This study focuses on the dependence of flow dynamics, heat transport and asymmetric mean temperature fields on the radius ratio eta. For the inverse Rossby number Ro(-1) = 1, as the Coriolis force balances inertial force, the flow is in the inertial regime. The mechanisms of zonal flow revolving in the prograde direction in this regime are attributed to the asymmetric movements of plumes and the different curvatures of the cylinders. The number of roll pairs is smaller than the circular roll hypothesis as the convection rolls are probably elongated by zonal flow. The physical mechanism of zonal flow is verified by the dependence of the drift frequency of the large-scale circulation (LSC) rolls and the space- and time-averaged azimuthal velocity on eta. The larger eta is, the weaker the zonal flow becomes. We show that the heat transport efficiency increases with eta. It is also found that the bulk temperature deviates from the arithmetic mean temperature and the deviation increases as eta decreases. This effect can be explained by a simple model that accounts for the curvature effects and the radially dependent centrifugal force in ACRBC.

We develop an efficient numerical method to compute single slit or double slit diffraction patterns from high frequency wave in inhomogeneous media. We approximate the high frequency asymptotic solution to the Helmholtz equation using the Eulerian Gaussian beam summation proposed in [20, 21]. The emitted rays from a slit are embedded in the phase space using an open segment. The evolution of this open curve is accurately computed using the recently developed Grid Based Particle Method [24] which results in a very efficient computational algorithm. Following the grid based particle method we proposed in [23, 24], we represent the open curve or the open surface by meshless Lagrangian particles sampled according to an underlying fixed Eulerian mesh. The end-points of the open curve are tracked explicitly and consistently with interior particles. To construct the overall wavefield, each of these sampling particles also carry necessary quantities that are obtained by solving advection-reaction equations. Numerical experiments show that the resulting method can model diffraction patterns in inhomogeneous media accurately, even in the occurrence of caustics.