Topological analysis of a mixing flow generated by natural convection

We use topological tools to describe the natural convective motion and the Lagrangian trajectories of a flow generated by stepwise, alternating heating and cooling protocol of opposite vertical walls of a cubic container. The working fluid considered is Newtonian and the system is in presence of the acceleration of gravity but the nonlinear terms are neglected, i.e., we study the piece-wise steady and linear problem. For this convective mixing flow, we identify invariant surfaces formed by the Lagrangian orbits of massless tracers that are topologically equivalent to spherical shells and period-1 lines with elliptic and hyperbolic segments that are located on symmetry planes. We describe the previous features as functions of the Rayleigh number in the range 3 × 104 ≤ Ra ≤ 5 × 105. We show that this system shares properties with other systems with non-toroidal invariant surfaces.