Thermal convection in an enclosure due to vibrations aboard spacecraft

The paper discusses thermal convection in an enclosure induced by spacecraft vibrations (g-jitter). Under normal circumstances (no maneuvers, no intentional spinning of the spacecraft) the g-jitter generates predominantly oscillatory velocity and temperature fields with zero time-mean values. The g-jitter can also generate secondary flows with non-zero mean, but they are of much smaller order. Some implications of the g-jitter on materials processing in space are discussed