Mechanics of Flow Similarities by Claus Weiland

Author:Claus Weiland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030429300
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Fig. 6.34The final collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, [77]

6.16 The Rayleigh Number

John William Strutt, third Baron Rayleigh, a British physicist, was born on Nov. 12, 1842 in Maldon, England and died on June 30, 1919 in Witham, England. From 1879 to 1884 he was the second Cavendish professor of experimental physics at Cambridge in succession to James Clark Maxwell. He was a fellow of the Royal Society (1873), served as its Secretary from 1885–1896 and as President from 1905–1908. In 1908 he accepted the post of Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. Rayleigh received a lot of honorary degrees and government awards amongst others the Nobel Prize in 1904, [78, 79]. His scientific work has encompassed the whole field of physics, in particular the wave theory, light scattering, acoustics, density of gases, electrodynamics, hydrodynamics, the analysis of dimensions, etc.. In 1871 Rayleigh published his theory of scattering (Rayleigh scattering law), where for the first time a correct explanation was given why the sky is blue.

The first volume of his great book, The Theory of Sound, appeared in print in 1877, followed by the second volume in 1878. His greatest contribution to science was the isolation of the gas argon from the atmosphere, for which he received the Nobel Prize, [80].

The Rayleigh number describes flows, which are governed by buoyancy, friction and heat conduction, [81]. Free convection flows belong to this class of problems. The Rayleigh number is the product of the Grashof number (Eq. (3.​3)) and the Prandtl number (Eq. (6.27))

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