Study on bifurcation to chaos of surface tension gradient driven flow

As the primary heat and mass transfer mechanism in space through natural convection, surface tension gradient-driven convection is a complex nonlinear process concerning strong coupling between fluid flow and heat transfer. It is also a multiple parameter coupling process that exhibits complex spatial-temporal characteristics. Therefore, the mechanism of the surface tension gradient-driven convection becomes a hotspot in microgravity fluid physics. It also has many important applications, such as in space fluid and energy management. In this paper, recent experimental and numerical results on the transition of surface tension gradient-driven convection are reviewed, especially the nonlinear analysis on the flow bifurcations to chaos. There are several numerical methods to obtain the corresponding bifurcation diagrams. One is to integrate the model forward in time starting from different parameters and initial values, and others are to calculate the asymptotic flow states and bifurcation points directly. The direct numerical simulation method and time series analysis are widely used, but searching for bifurcation points from a large number of data is burdensome. Bifurcation points can be computed directly with the numerical bifurcation method, but such calculations are more difficult to implement than the direct numerical method. © 2021 Advances in Mechanics.