Local boundary layer scales in turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection

We compute fully local boundary layer scales in three-dimensional turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection. These scales are directly connected to the highly intermittent fluctuations of the fluxes of momentum and heat at the isothermal top and bottom walls and are statistically distributed around the corresponding mean thickness scales. The local boundary layer scales also reflect the strong spatial inhomogeneities of both boundary layers due to the large-scale, but complex and intermittent, circulation that builds up in closed convection cells. Similar to turbulent boundary layers, we define inner scales based on local shear stress that can be consistently extended to the classical viscous scales in bulk turbulence, e.g. the Kolmogorov scale, and outer scales based on slopes at the wall. We discuss the consequences of our generalization, in particular the scaling of our inner and outer boundary layer thicknesses and the resulting shear Reynolds number with respect to the Rayleigh number. The mean outer thickness scale for the temperature field is close to the standard definition of a thermal boundary layer thickness. In the case of the velocity field, under certain conditions the outer scale follows a scaling similar to that of the Prandtl-Blasius type definition with respect to the Rayleigh number, but differs quantitatively. The friction coefficient c(epsilon) scaling is found to fall right between the laminar and turbulent limits, which indicates that the boundary layer exhibits transitional behaviour. Additionally, we conduct an analysis of the recently suggested dissipation layer thickness scales versus the Rayleigh number and find a transition in the scaling. All our investigations are based on highly accurate spectral element simulations that reproduce gradients and their fluctuations reliably. The study is done for a Prandtl number of Pr = 0.7 and for Rayleigh numbers that extend over almost five orders of magnitude, 3 x 10(5) <= Ra <= 10(10), in cells with an aspect ratio of one. We also performed one study with an aspect ratio equal to three in the case of Ra = 10(8). For both aspect ratios, we find that the scale distributions depend on the position at the plates where the analysis is conducted.