EXPERIMENTS ON THE INSTABILITY OF THERMOCAPILLARY CONVECTION - A BRIEF REVIEW

This paper reviews laboratory experiments conducted on flows driven by thermocapillarity which are also hydrodynamically unstable. Such flows, and their instabilities, are of interest in applications such as crystal growth from bulk melts, where the onset of instability can lead to the degradation of material properties. In addition, thermocapillary-driven flows assume increased importance in microgravity applications, where they are not overwhelmed by convection driven by buoyancy.