Rigorous scaling laws for internally heated convection at infinite Prandtl number
File(s)2205.03175.pdf (980.82 KB)
Published version
Author(s)
Arslan, Ali
Fantuzzi, giovanni
Craske, john
Wynn, andew
Type
Working Paper
Abstract
New bounds are proven on the mean vertical convective heat transport, ⟨wT⟩¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯, for uniform internally heated (IH) convection in the limit of infinite Prandtl number. For fluid in a horizontally-periodic layer between isothermal boundaries, we show that ⟨wT⟩¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯≤12−cR−2, where R is a nondimensional `flux' Rayleigh number quantifying the strength of internal heating and c=216. Then, ⟨wT⟩¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯=0 corresponds to vertical heat transport by conduction alone, while ⟨wT⟩¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯>0 represents the enhancement of vertical heat transport upwards due to convective motion. If, instead, the lower boundary is a thermal insulator, then we obtain ⟨wT⟩¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯≤12−cR−4, with c≈0.0107. This result implies that the Nusselt number Nu, defined as the ratio of the total-to-conductive heat transport, satisfies Nu≲R4. Both bounds are obtained by combining the background method with a minimum principle for the fluid's temperature and with Hardy--Rellich inequalities to exploit the link between the vertical velocity and temperature. In both cases, power-law dependence on R improves the previously best-known bounds, which, although valid at both infinite and finite Prandtl numbers, approach the uniform bound exponentially with R.
Date Issued
2022-05-09
Citation
2022
Publisher
arXiv
Copyright Statement
© 2022 The Author(s). This work is published under CC BY 4.0 International licence.
License URL
Identifier
https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.03175
Subjects
physics.flu-dyn
physics.flu-dyn
math-ph
math.MP
Publication Status
Published