A shadowgraph movie showing the large-scale flow and the spatial distribution of thermal plumes in a quasi-two-dimensional cylindrical convection cell. The working fluid is water and the bulk fluid temperature is at 40ºC with the Prandtl number Pr = 4.3 and the Rayleigh number Ra = 3.4��109.

Click the picture to see the steady-state motion of the convective flow confined in the thin cylinder. The movie is played at a speed 4 times faster than the real speed. It is seen that the thermal plumes organize themselves with rising warm plumes on the right and falling cold plumes on the left, giving rise to a counter-clock-wise large-scale circulation across the entire cell. One sees the interaction of thermal plumes with the conducting plate more clearly by repeated pause and play of the movie.