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The shapes of the velocity and temperature profiles near the horizontal conducting plates' centre regions in turbulent Rayleigh–Bénard convection are studied numerically and experimentally over the Rayleigh number range 10 8 ≲ Ra ≲ 3 × 10 11 and the Prandtl number range 0.7 ≲ Pr ≲ 5.4. The results show that both the temperature and velocity profiles agree well with the classical Prandtl–Blasius (PB) laminar boundary-layer profiles, if they are re-sampled in the respective dynamical reference frames that fluctuate with the instantaneous thermal and velocity boundary-layer thicknesses. The study further shows that the PB boundary layer in turbulent thermal convection not only holds in a time-averaged sense, but is most of the time also valid in an instantaneous sense.
Zhou et al. (Wed,) studied this question.