D. E. Melnikov¹, V. M. Shevtsova²

FDMP-Fluid Dynamics & Materials Processing, Vol.1, No.2, pp. 189-200, 2005, DOI:10.3970/fdmp.2005.001.189

Abstract Buoyancy-driven convective flows are numerically analyzed in a cubic enclosure, containing a liquid subjected to a temperature difference between opposite lateral walls; all other walls are thermally insulated. The stationary gravity vector is perpendicular to the applied temperature gradient. The steady flow patterns are investigated within the framework of a liquid particles tracing technique. Three tracing techniques are compared: the first, based on a trilinear interpolation of the liquid velocity defined on the computational grid and an eighth order in time Runge-Kutta method; the second and the third, using a resampling the velocity field on a new approximately twice finer… More >

N.I. Wakayama¹, D.C. Yin², J.W. Qi³

FDMP-Fluid Dynamics & Materials Processing, Vol.1, No.2, pp. 153-170, 2005, DOI:10.3970/fdmp.2005.001.153

Abstract The production of crystals of adequate size and high quality is the "bottleneck'' for three-dimensional structure analysis of protein crystals. In this work, in order to shed additional light on the (still controversial) beneficial effect of microgravity on crystal growth, we focus on recent advanced experimental and theoretical research about the effects of buoyancy-driven convection on protein crystallization. In the light of the numerical studies the following major outcomes can be highlighted: (1) when the crystal size exceeds several dozens of µm, buoyancy-driven convection dominates solute transport near the growing crystal and the crystal growth rate becomes larger than that… More >

Marcello Lappa^{1, 2}

FDMP-Fluid Dynamics & Materials Processing, Vol.1, No.1, pp. 1-20, 2005, DOI:10.3970/fdmp.2005.001.001

Abstract Possible natural transport mechanisms in cubical and shallow cavities with different heating conditions (from below or from the side) are investigated by means of numerical solution of the non-linear model equations and multiprocessor computations. Attention is focused on a variety of three-dimensional steady effects that can arise in such configurations in the case of low-Pr liquids (silicon melt) even for relatively small values of the temperature gradient due to localized boundary effects and/or true instabilities of the flow. Such aspects are still poorly known or completely ignored owing to the fact that most of the existing experiments focused on the… More >