This is a simple numerical simulation of the thermohaline circulation in the ocean. The simulation assumes that the density of the ocean is a linear function of temperature and salinity only in order to use then the Bousinessq approximation for the Navier-Stokes equations. You can find more information in the report of the project, inside the folder latex/report.
The code is written in C++ and the animation is done in Python. You will need the library Eigen to compile it, as it is used for the linear algebra operations (with sparse matrices). You can check its webpage from here.
In order to properly compile the code, you will to ensure that the eigen3 folder is correctly linked in the Makefile file. Either you have the eigen3 folder in the path /usr/include/, being this folder in the path of the system, or you will need to specify the library path in the Makefile in the INCLUDES variable. Keep in mind that you may also need to change python to python3 in the run.sh file if you are using python3 instead of python.
To compile the code, first download it:
git clone git@github.com:victorballester7/thermohaline-convection.git
cd thermohaline-convection
Then, you can compile and run the code (having previously check your input parameters in the file config/input.txt) with the following command:
./run.sh
If you get an error, you may need to activate the execution permissions of the file run.sh with the following command:
chmod +x run.sh
If activated in the file config/input.txt (check the readme of the input file in docs/input_README.txt), the code will also animate the solution.
The code is mainly in the src folder, and the headers are in the include folder. In the config folder you can find the input file and the output files are found in the output folder. Finally, in the docs folder you can find the documentation of the input file and other papers with information about the thermohaline circulation.
Here you can see some results of the simulation. In particular, in the video below we show how the flow is initially circulating due to temperature convection and the suddenly changes to a salinity convection pattern.