Spontaneous formation of travelling localized structures and their asymptotic behaviour in binary fluid convection

Abstract

Abstract We study spontaneous pattern formation and its asymptotic behaviour in binary fluid flow driven by a temperature gradient. When the conductive state is unstable and the size of the domain is large enough, finitely many spatially localized time-periodic travelling pulses (PTPs), each containing a certain number of convection cells, are generated spontaneously in the conductive state and are finally arranged at non-uniform intervals while moving in the same direction. We found that the role of PTP solutions and their strong interactions (collision) are important in characterizing the asymptotic state. Detailed investigations of pulse–pulse interactions showed the differences in asymptotic behaviour between that in a finite but large domain and in an infinite domain.