The wind driving boundary layer flow in centrifuged convection

Centrifuged convection, with the convection cell at the end of a long arm in rapid rotation about an axis orthogonal to the arm with the hot and cold wall normals parallel to the arm, produces a centrifugal acceleration that can be much larger than gravitational acceleration. This is different to rotating convection with gravity parallel to rotation, where centrifugal buoyancy is small and often ignored. In contrast, here gravity is relatively small. Ignoring it, the total acceleration is due to centrifugal buoyancy normal to the rotation axis and the hot and cold walls. Coriolis effects do not inhibit convection but do inhibit flow parallel to the rotation axis. For small Rayleigh numbers Ra≲106, defined using the centrifugal acceleration rather than gravitational acceleration, the flow is quasi-two-dimensional. For Ra>106, the flow becomes three-dimensional and drives a strong wind that is confined to the boundary layers. We numerically explore the flow dynamics and its impacts on heat transfer for these larger Rayleigh numbers, up to 109, where the strong shear flow organized by the Coriolis force and the centrifugal baroclinic torque lead to boundary layer transitions with thermal plumes trying to emerge from the boundary layers being subjected to strong vortex tilting and stretching as they are swept along the walls by the wind.