title: Nonequilibrium fluctuations in the Rayleigh-Benard problem for binary fluid mixtures.
abstract: We have employed a simple Galerkin-approximation scheme to calculate nonequilibrium temperature and concentration fluctuations in a binary fluid subjected to a temperature gradient with realistic boundary conditions. When a fluid mixture is driven outside thermal equilibrium, there are two instability mechanisms, namely a Rayleigh (stationary) and a Hopf (oscillatory) instability, causing long-ranged fluctuations. The competition of these two mechanisms causes the structure factor associated with the temperature fluctuations to exhibit two maxima as a function of the wave number q of the fluctuations, in particular, close to the convective instability. In the presence of thermally conducting but impermeable walls the intensity of the temperature fluctuations vanishes as q goes to zero, while the intensity of the concentration fluctuations remains finite in the limit of vanishing q. Finally, we propose a simpler small-Lewis-number approximation scheme, which is useful to represent nonequilibrium concentration fluctuations for mixtures with positive separation ratio, even close to (but below) the convective instability.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Física Aplicada 1, Facultad de Ciencias Físicas, Universidad Complutense, E-28040, Madrid, Spain. jmortizz@fis.ucm.es
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Ortiz de Zárate
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Peluso
authors.forename: J V
authors.initials: JV
authors.lastname: Sengers