Mechanical forcings

The flows in planetary fluid layers (e.g. planetary liquid cores) are mostly attributed to density variations, in particular when studying planetary magnetic fields generated by dynamos. Thus, the associated numerical simulations typically consider convective flows in perfectly spherical shells. However, such an approach completely ignores the flows driven by mechanical forcings, i.e. disturbances in planetary rotation/shape. This may explain why current models fail to explain some observations such as the Early Moon dynamo or the Vega-like stellar magnetism.

Our goal is thus to study how global planetary flows are driven by mechanical forcings such as tides, libration, precession, or topographic coupling at the Core-Mantle Boundary (CMB). To do so, we combine theoretical calculations and numerical simulations in order to extract the scaling laws governing the flows dissipation, the heat transport, the magnetic field generation, etc.