FEMCon

FEMCon is an interactive tool that lets you explore thermal convection in a nutshell. Why are Geoscientists interested in thermal convection? Thats because the Earths mantle is slowly convecting (mantle convection) due to high thermal gradients at the core-mantle boundary and at the Earths surface. Mantle convection is the driving mechanism for all the dynamic processes we observe at the Earths surface and which make our planet so special: continental drift, moutain building, volcanism, earthquakes, ... all of those processes are in the end all related to thermal convection of the Earths mantle. So its important to understand how it works.

After choosing a set of parameters, FEMCon solves the incompressible thermal convection equations for a viscous fluid using the Finite Element Method (FEM). FEMCon consists of a fast thermal convection solver written in C and a Java GUI frontend that serves to visualize the results. FEMCon gives you an easy way of exploring (1) how the connectivity of a system depends on the Rayleigh number and (2) how the results depend on the choice of numerical parameters.

FEMCon computes the two most important quantitative geophysical measures characterizing a thermally convecting system, namely the Nusselt number and the root-mean-square velocity, throughout the simulations. Plotting the time evolution of those parameters along with temperature or velocity fields gives you a good feel about how the system evolves depending on the Rayleigh number.