Transition to Chaos of Buoyant-Thermocapillary Convection in Large-Scale Liquid Bridges

To cooperate with the Chinese TG-2 space experiment project, the transition routes to chaos of buoyant-thermocapillary convection were experimentally researched in large-scale liquid bridge of 2cSt silicone oil with 20 mm in diameter. A Nanovoltmeter with high resolution was adopted to measure the dynamical temperature oscillations, as well as to detect the convective transitional behaviors which were nonlinear and non-stationary. The existence of the quasi-periodic route and the Feigenbaum route has been confirmed in large-scale LBs, and a novel periodic oscillation state was discussed in detail for the first time. The chaotic characteristics were verified by analyzing the maximum Lyapunov exponent and correlation dimension on the basis of a phase-space reconstruction. Additionally, it was found that bifurcation could potentially lead to the reconstruction of flow fields