Direct Numerical Simulation of a turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection at very low Prandtl number

Direct numerical simulation of a liquid sodium (Pr=) Rayleigh-Bénard configuration at Ra=. Simulation was carried out on the MareNostrum4 supercomputer using 3872 CPU cores and a mesh of billion grid points (2048×966×966). Numerically, the governing equations were discretised in space on a Cartesian staggered grid using a finite-volume fourth-order symmetry-preserving scheme.