A laboratory experiment to reach an internal gravity wave turbulence regime

The search for laboratory observations of fully developed internal gravity wave turbulence has been an active topic over the past decade. This regime of weakly non-linear stratified turbulence is, however, difficult to reach due to the separation between the linear and non-linear timescales required by the weakly non-linear assumption. To approach this dynamics, we designed a large-scale laboratory experiment comprising a 2.5m tall cylindrical tank filled with a linearly stratified fluid and a meter-scale wave generator. We will present the first experiments realized with this setup designed to reach higher Reynolds numbers and lower Froude numbers than in previous experiments. These results constitute a significant step towards the observation of fully-developed internal gravity wave turbulence in the lab.