PATTERN DYNAMICS IN A BENARD-MARANGONI CONVECTION EXPERIMENT

In this paper we report a Benard-Marangoni convection experiment in a small aspect ratio square cell, at a high Rayleigh number. In the time dependent convection regime, low dimensional chaotic behaviour is ide ntified for a variable measured from the pattern. A dynamical system i s proposed to model the behaviour of this variable, and predictions in duced by this model on the dynamics of the temperature are experimenta lly verified. The comparison between the experimental data and the one obtained from the model relies on the topological properties (braid t ype) of unstable periodic orbits.