Modelling stellar convective transport with plumes - I. Non-equilibrium turbulence effect in double-averaging formulation

Plumes in a convective flow are considered to be relevant to the turbulent transport in convection. The effective mass, momentum, and heat transports in the convective turbulence are investigated in the framework of time-space double averaging procedure, where a field quantity is decomposed into three parts: the spatiotemporal mean (spatial average of the time-averaged) field, the dispersion or coherent fluctuation, and the random or incoherent fluctuation. With this framework, turbulent correlations in the mean-field equations are divided into the dispersion/coherent and random/incoherent correlation part. By reckoning the plume as the coherent fluctuation, a transport model for the convective turbulence is constructed with the aid of the non-equilibrium effect, in which the change of turbulence characteristics along the mean stream is taken into account for the modelling of the turbulent transport coefficients. In this work, for the first time, change of turbulence properties along plume motions is incorporated into the expression of the turbulent transport coefficients. This non-equilibrium model is applied to a stellar convective flow. One of the prominent characteristics of a surface cooling-driven convection, the enhanced and localized turbulent mass flux below the surface layer, which cannot be reproduced at all by the usual eddy-diffusivity model with mixing length theory (MLT), is well reproduced by the present model. Our results show that the incorporation of plume motion into turbulent transport model is an important and very relevant extension of mean-field theory beyond the heuristic gradient transport model with MLT.

Automated summary

This study investigates the mass, momentum, and heat transports in convective turbulence using the time-space double averaging procedure. By considering plumes as coherent fluctuations, a non-equilibrium model for convective turbulence is developed, which incorporates the change of turbulence characteristics along the mean stream into the expression of turbulent transport coefficients. The results demonstrate that incorporating plume motion into the turbulent transport model is an important extension of mean-field theory, and it successfully reproduces the enhanced and localized turbulent mass flux observed in surface cooling-driven convection.