Phase IV: Continued Development of the Core Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at UCLA

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This award will allow the planetary core dynamics research group at UCLA to carry out fundamental laboratory research that bridges important gaps that exist between current computer models of the geodynamo and advanced theoretical models of geophysical turbulence. The group's unique, custom-designed and -built laboratory devices allow them to characterize the convective flows that exist in planetary core settings. Using water and liquid gallium as the working fluids, the team will investigate more extreme parameters than are attainable in current simulations of planetary dynamo action. Thus, this research will provide the essential laboratory data necessary to benchmark and validate advanced theories of core flow and to build predictive models of turbulent planetary dynamo generation in liquid metals. These results will be useful to modelers of Earth's core and other planetary dynamos, as well as modelers of fluid turbulence, solar and stellar convection zones and dynamos, and modelers of Earth's climate and planetary atmospheres. Furthermore, this work will enable two disparate geophysical communities to integrate their modeling approaches, and ultimately, generate more robust and geophysically applicable simulations. In carrying out these tasks, this project will provide training in advanced laboratory experimentation, numerical and theoretical modeling to three graduate students, one undergraduate and one researcher. This funding also allows the PI team to expand their unique library of educational films about geophysical fluid dynamics that is freely accessible to the public (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/user/spinlabucla).With this award, UCLA SpinLab researchers will carry out a series of rapidly rotating convection experiments in water that will elucidate principles about turbulent convective flows occurring in planetary cores. These experiments will be conducted using the new NSF-funded NoMag device that exists in the PI's lab at UCLA, and that allows the investigators to image and quantify the convective velocity, vorticity and helicity fields at Ekman numbers as low as 3 x 10^-8. Using gallium as the working fluid in their NSF-funded RoMag device, the team will continue to conduct rotating magnetoconvection experiments, enhanced by closely- coupled numerical simulations. The novel data these RoMag experiments provide will allow the researchers to quantify and diagnose the complex magnetohyrdrodynamics occuring in a simulated parcel of Earth's core fluid (Elsasser number ~ 1; Ekman numbers 5 x 10^-8). This work will provide fundamental laboratory data necessary to benchmark and validate advanced numerical and theoretical models of core flow and to build predictive models of turbulent planetary dynamo generation in liquid metals.