Capturing the baroclinic effect in non-Boussinesq gravity currents

Abstract

Direct numerical simulations of two-dimensional gravity currents with small and medium density variations are performed using different non-Boussinesq buoyancy approximations. Taking the full low-Mach-number approximation as the reference, the accuracy of several buoyancy terms are examined. It is found that all considered buoyancy terms performed well in the cases with small density variation. In the cases with medium density variation, the classical gravitational Boussinesq’s buoyancy term showed the lack of accuracy, and a simple correction did not make any improvement. In contrast, the recently introduced second-order buoyancy term showed a significantly higher accuracy. The present results and our previous derivations indicate that simple algebraic buoyancy approximations extended from the Boussinesq’s gravitational buoyancy are unlikely to achieve an accuracy beyond first order. Instead, it seems necessary to solve at least one extra Poisson equation for buoyancy terms to capture the higher-order baroclinic effect. An approximate analysis is also provided to show the leading term of the non-Boussinesq effect corresponding to gravity.

Keywords

• Baroclinic effect
• Gravity current