Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Inertial waves in a laboratory model of the Earth's core
    (2011) Triana, Santiago Andres; Lathrop, Daniel P; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    A water-filled three-meter diameter spherical shell built as a model of the Earth's core shows evidence of precessionally forced flows and, when spinning the inner sphere differentially, inertial modes are excited. We identified the precessionally forced flow to be primarily the spin-over inertial mode, i.e., a uniform vorticity flow whose rotation axis is not aligned with the container's rotation axis. A systematic study of the spin-over mode is carried out, showing that the amplitude dependence on the Poincaré number is in qualitative agreement with Busse's laminar theory while its phase differs significantly, likely due to topographic effects. At high rotation rates free shear layers concentrating most of the kinetic energy of the spin-over mode have been observed. When spinning the inner sphere differentially, a total of 12 inertial modes have been identified, reproducing and extending previous experimental results. The inertial modes excited appear ordered according to their azimuthal drift speed as the Rossby number is varied.
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    Rotating, hydromagnetic laboratory experiment modelling planetary cores
    (2009) Kelley, Douglas H.; Lathrop, Daniel P.; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation describes a series of laboratory experiments motivated by planetary cores and the dynamo effect, the mechanism by which the flow of an electrically conductive fluid can give rise to a spontaneous magnetic field. Our experimental apparatus, meant to be a laboratory model of Earth's core, contains liquid sodium between an inner, solid sphere and an outer, spherical shell. The fluid is driven by the differential rotation of these two boundaries, each of which is connected to a motor. Applying an axial, DC magnetic field, we use a collection of Hall probes to measure the magnetic induction that results from interactions between the applied field and the flowing, conductive fluid. We have observed and identified inertial modes, which are bulk oscillations of the fluid restored by the Coriolis force. Over-reflection at a shear layer is one mechanism capable of exciting such modes, and we have developed predictions of both onset boundaries and mode selection from over-reflection theory which are consistent with our observations. Also, motivated by previous experimental devices that used ferromagnetic boundaries to achieve dynamo action, we have studied the effects of a soft iron (ferromagnetic) inner sphere on our apparatus, again finding inertial waves. We also find that all behaviors are more broadband and generally more nonlinear in the presence of a ferromagnetic boundary. Our results with a soft iron inner sphere have implications for other hydromagnetic experiments with ferromagnetic boundaries, and are appropriate for comparison to numerical simulations as well. From our observations we conclude that inertial modes almost certainly occur in planetary cores and will occur in future rotating experiments. In fact, the predominance of inertial modes in our experiments and in other recent work leads to a new paradigm for rotating turbulence, starkly different from turbulence theories based on assumptions of isotropy and homogeneity, starting instead with inertial modes, which are the linear eigenmodes of any rapidly rotating fluid.