On the optimal design of wall-to-wall heat transport

TL;DR

This paper rigorously analyzes the optimal design of fluid flows for maximizing heat transport, revealing scaling laws and proposing near-optimal flow structures under energy and enstrophy constraints.

Contribution

It establishes the scaling laws for maximum heat transport under different constraints and introduces a novel 'branching' flow design that nearly achieves optimal transport.

Findings

Transport scales linearly with r.m.s. kinetic energy.

Transport scales as the 1/3 power of mean enstrophy.

Branching flow design achieves near-optimal transport.

Abstract

We consider the problem of optimizing heat transport through an incompressible fluid layer. Modeling passive scalar transport by advection-diffusion, we maximize the mean rate of total transport by a divergence-free velocity field. Subject to various boundary conditions and intensity constraints, we prove that the maximal rate of transport scales linearly in the r.m.s. kinetic energy and, up to possible logarithmic corrections, as the $1/3$rd power of the mean enstrophy in the advective regime. This makes rigorous a previous prediction on the near optimality of convection rolls for energy-constrained transport. Optimal designs for enstrophy-constrained transport are significantly more difficult to describe: we introduce a "branching" flow design with an unbounded number of degrees of freedom and prove it achieves nearly optimal transport. The main technical tool behind these results is a variational principle for evaluating the transport of candidate designs. The principle admits dual formulations for bounding transport from above and below. While the upper bound is closely related to the "background method", the lower bound reveals a connection between the optimal design problems considered herein and other apparently related model problems from mathematical materials science. These connections serve to motivate designs.