Experimental study of stratified turbulence forced with columnar dipoles

International audienceWe present a novel experimental setup aimed at producing a forced strongly stratified turbulent flow. The flow is forced by an arena of 12 vortex pair generators in a large tank. The continuous interactions of the randomly produced vortex pairs give rise to a statistically stationary disordered flow in contrast to previous experiments where the stratified turbulence is decaying. The buoyancy frequency N is set to its highest value N = 1.7 rad/s using salt as stratifying agent so that the horizontal Froude number Fh = Ω/N is low, while the buoyancy Reynolds number ℛ=ReFh2, where Re = Ωa2/ν is the classical Reynolds number, is as high as possible given the experimental constraints (Ω is the maximum angular velocity of the vortices, a their radius and ν the viscosity). PIV measurements show that the flow is not homogeneous in the horizontal plane and is organised into horizontal layers along the vertical. When ℛ is increased, we observe a progressive evolution from the viscosity dominated regime with smooth layers to a regime with small scales superimposed on the layers and for which the vertical Froude number is of order one. The latter regime resembles the strongly stratified turbulent regime with a downscale cascade that has been predicted for large ℛ. However, horizontal second order structure functions do not exhibit a clear inertial range for the largest ℛ achieved ℛ=310. In addition, the corresponding turbulent buoyancy Reynolds number ℛt=P/(νN2) based on an estimation of the injection rate of energy P is only of order unity ℛt≃0.4 indicating that only the edge of the strongly stratified turbulent regime has been reached. However, these results suggest that sufficiently large turbulent buoyancy Reynolds numbers, ℛt≃10, could be achieved experimentally by scaling up five times this novel set-up