Barrel of Ilmenau: a large-scale convection experiment to study dust devil-like flow structures

We present an experimental facility for the validation of numerical simulations on atmospheric dust devils in a controlled laboratory experiment. Dust devils are atmospheric air vortices with a vertical axis, and are formed by intense solar radiation and the resulting vertical temperature gradient. The structure of a typical dust devil is dominated by a radial inflow near the surface and a vertical upward flow within the vortex. These vortices have been studied in recent years using field observations, in situ measurements, and large-eddy simulation (LES). Field tests suffer from the limited area and their unpredictable behavior, while the LES approach cannot resolve the dust devils well enough. Dust devil-like structures may also occur in direct numerical simulation (DNS) with a Rayleigh number of at least Ra = 10^7 in Rayleigh-Bénard convection, with the advantage that the structures can be resolved more precisely. In order to validate the DNS approach and provide measurement data, the airflow is measured inside of a large-scale Rayleigh-Bénard cell of similar geometry (i.e. inside the Barrel of Ilmenau) to the DNS set-up for Rayleigh numbers from Ra = 10^6 to Ra = 10^12. For the measurement of the flow in a large volume, an optical measurement method is used to obtain the trajectories of single particles. Since there are no commercial systems that are suitable for such a large measurement volume, we developed our own system.