Effects of the chaotic behavior of a superposition of waves in the flux across a channel

Several numerical experiments were carried out to study the effects of chaotic behavior on the net tracer flux across a channel. The flow is given by a superposition of two propagating waves. The domain was set up so that a mode-I wave would fit on it, and the perturbation was a mode-4 wave. The experiments were carried out using a grid model with a second-order upwind differencing scheme. Simple Newtonian diffusion was used, and the velocities were calculated from a stream-function satisfying no normal flow boundary conditions. The experiments showed a small increase in the flux does appear due to the chaotic behavior, but this effect is only around 5% when the flux is compared to the one obtained from a pure 1-mode wave system. In contrast there is a difference of around 20% when the pure mode- 1 wave is compared to the pure mode-4 wave, the first one being more transportive. The chaotic behavior of the system is described in detail and a Lagrangian experiment was carried out as well to examine the motion of the particles and to explore a different approach to describing the dispersion of a tracer.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

1999

Author dc:creator

• Trevino Lozano, Carlos H. (Carlos Horatio), 1971-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Glenn R. Flierl.

• Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/57668

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/57668