[aspect-devel] Question regarding heat fluxes

[Eric Heien]

Are you normalizing based on the size of the boundary?  One thing that is not obvious and that we've had troubles with is that the printed flux is not per unit area, but over the whole boundary area.  Maybe this should be changed?

-Eric

On Nov 15, 2012, at 9:27 AM, Ian Rose wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I have been doing some tests with aspect involving heat fluxes out of the
> top and bottom boundaries, and am getting some behavior I don't
> understand.
> 
> When the convection reaches steady state, the heat fluxes out of the top
> and bottom should be equal and opposite, otherwise, of course, it wouldn't
> be steady.  However, if I look at a simple convection model in with 2d
> shells, I find that the flux out the top is considerably lower than the
> flux out of the bottom at steady state.  I am attaching a prm file and a
> plot of heat fluxes as demonstration.  The qualitative change at ~10 Gyr is
> due to a transition from organized to chaotic convection.  The basic heat
> flux story is unchanged, though.
> 
> Looking at the code for heat flux statistics, nothing seems obviously
> wrong.  I should note that doing the same test for a box geometry where the
> top and bottom have the same area produces the expected results.
> 
> Am I missing something about how this should work?  Any insights as to what
> is going on would be appreciated.
> Best,
> Ian
> 
> PS All calculations are done with r1353
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