Contributed talk in Complex Dynamical Systems 2, July 30, 2019, 11:30 a.m. in room USB.2.022

Attractor Landscapes and Information Processing by Convective Obstacle Flows

Stuart Bartlett, Yuk Yung

watch Publication We present a series of recent results concerning the attractor landscape, memory, hysteresis and computation that can emerge in simple convective obstacle flows. In these systems a single phase fluid is heated from below and cooled from above. Small obstacles (one or two) are placed on the horizontal mid plane of the system and extract some fraction of the fluid’s horizontal or vertical momentum. Horizontal momentum sinks tend to attract convection plumes. Vertical momentum sinks are bistable; the obstacle will either align with a convection cell centre or convection plume depending on initial conditions and the history of the system. The resulting attractor landscape can be exploited to produce a single bit memory or even elementary Boolean logic. We outline the key results of these numerical studies, and suggest directions for future investigations.