Full-field and time-resolved tomographic PIV of turbulent thermal convection inside a cylinder

Rayleigh-Bénard convection, the buoyancy-driven flow induced by temperature gradients parallel to the gravity, is relevant to a variety of processes spontaneously occurring in nature or used in technological applications. Understanding of its inherent chaotic evolution is possible only through measurement techniques that allow to access the unsteady, three-dimensional behavior of all the thermo-fluid dynamic quantities of the flow. This work presents full-field and time-resolved tomographic particle image velocimetry measurements of non-rotating and rotating Rayleigh-Bénard convection inside a slender cylinder with aspect ratio equal to 1/2 at Rayleigh and Prandtl numbers equal to 1.86 × 10^8 and 7.6.