Sabrina Francesca Pellegrino
(LMB - Université de Bari)
Salt fingering is a mechanism of double-diffusive convection that occurs in fluids where density is controlled by two buoyancy-changing scalars that diffuse at different rates. This set-up allows the convective cells to assume the shape of tall finger-like structures called “salt fingers”.
We consider a system of porous media equations describing the phenomenon in terms of horizontally averaged kinetic energy field and buoyancy. We prove the existence of solutions for such system studying the compactness properties of the solutions of a smooth approximation of the problem and then passing to the limit. The results were obtained in collaboration with Giuseppe Maria Coclite (Politecnico di Bari) and Francesco Paparella (NYU-Abu Dhabi Campus).