Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 219, 121–130 (2013) © EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag 2013 DOI: 10.1140/epjst/e2013-01787-1 T HE EUROPEAN P HYSICAL JOURNAL SPECIAL TOPICS Regular Article On the transition from cellular to wavelike patterns during solutal Marangoni convection Karin Schwarzenberger 1 , Thomas K¨ ollner 2 , Hartmut Linde 3 , Stefan Odenbach 1 , Thomas Boeck 2, a , and Kerstin Eckert 1, b 1 Institute of Fluid Mechanics, Chair of Magnetofluiddynamics, Technische Universit¨ at Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany 2 Institute of Thermodynamics and Fluid Mechanics, Technische Universit¨ at Ilmenau, PO Box 10 05 65, 98684 Ilmenau, Germany 3 Str. 201, Nr. 6, 13156 Berlin, Germany Received 1 July 2012 / Received in final form 18 January 2013 Published online 19 March 2013 Abstract. We study characteristic convection patterns emerging dur- ing the mass transfer of acetic acid from a glycerol-water layer to a superposed acetone layer by means of experiments and numerical sim- ulations. The patterns form as a result of the stationary Marangoni instability. The initial phase of the pattern evolution is studied us- ing high-resolution simulations. They show hierarchically ordered cel- lular structures which closely resemble experimental observations. In the later stages presently accessible to the experiments, the cells are locally replaced by relaxation oscillation waves. The emergence of these structures is favored when the experiment is performed in narrow cuvettes. 1 Introduction Mass transfer across liquid interfaces is frequently accompanied by solutal Marangoni convection with complex and irregular flow structures. This kind of convection, stud- ied in the pioneering work by Sternling & Scriven [1], is of considerable importance in chemical engineering. Depending on the properties of the hydrodynamic system and on the direction of mass transfer, the solutal Marangoni instability may occur in an oscillatory or a stationary mode. This work deals with the latter mode, which fre- quently develops from small to large scales in a cascade-like process. This hierarchical evolution displays a characteristic sequence of flow structures which are repeated on different length scales. Recently we proposed a scheme to classify the different convection patterns of stationary Marangoni instability into three basic planforms [2]: Marangoni roll cells (RCs), relaxation oscillations (ROs) as their unsteady counterpart and an ensemble of consecutively aligned fronts referred to as relaxation oscillation waves (ROW s). The ROW s appear as collectively propagating arrays of parallel stripes. By contrast, the a e-mail: thomas.boeck@tu-ilmenau.de b e-mail: kerstin.eckert@tu-dresden.de