wash & fold study group


Dec 2, 2013, Monday 1pm
Howey W508 conference room
Jeff Tithof
Abstract: In this talk, a new technique for describing the dynamics of spatiotemporal chaos in Rayleigh-Benard convection is discussed. We collect shadowgraph images of multiple time series of weakly chaotic flows, each starting from similar initial conditions which we impose using a laser. We then encode the topological characteristics of each frame into a so-called persistence diagram, measure the distance across all diagrams, and study the dynamical behavior. Results are compared to similar analyses of simulation data. This new methodology provides unique insight into the time evolution of this dynamical system and the chaotic evolution across separate runs, in both experiment and simulation.
Slides from the talk can be found here
Here is a video that shows two experimental RBC runs, starting from similar initial conditions.
Here is a video that shows an experimental run and the latest numerical simulation.