Instantaneous measurement of velocity fields in developed thermal turbulence in mercury.

Using ultrasonic velocimetry we measured the vertical profile of the velocity fluctuation in high-Rayleigh-number thermal convection in a cell with aspect ratio of 0.5, filled with a low-Prandtl-number fluid, mercury. The intriguing fluctuating dynamics of the mean flow and universal nature of the kinetic energy cascade are elucidated utilizing spectral decomposition and reconstruction. The scaling properties of the structure functions and the energy spectrum are directly calculated without the use of Taylor's frozen-flow hypothesis. Despite the complex nature of the mean flow, it is found that the energy cascade process exhibits universal laws in thermal turbulence.