Rigorous scaling laws for internally heated convection at infinite Prandtl number

TL;DR

This paper establishes rigorous bounds on heat transport in internally heated convection at infinite Prandtl number, showing power-law scaling with the Rayleigh number that improves previous exponential bounds.

Contribution

The authors derive new power-law bounds on vertical heat transport and Nusselt number for internally heated convection at infinite Prandtl number, using advanced mathematical techniques.

Findings

Bound on mean vertical heat transport:  - c R^{-2} for isothermal boundaries

Bound on heat transport:  - c R^{-4} for insulating lower boundary

Nusselt number scales as R^{4} at high Rayleigh numbers

Abstract

New bounds are proven on the mean vertical convective heat transport, $\overline{\langle wT \rangle}$, 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 $\overline{\langle wT \rangle} \leq \frac12 - c R^{-2}$, where $R$ is a nondimensional `flux' Rayleigh number quantifying the strength of internal heating and $c = 216$. Then, $\overline{\langle wT \rangle} = 0$ corresponds to vertical heat transport by conduction alone, while $\overline{\langle wT \rangle} > 0$ represents the enhancement of vertical heat transport upwards due to convective motion. If, instead, the lower boundary is a thermal insulator, then we obtain $\overline{\langle wT \rangle} \leq \frac12 - c R^{-4}$, with $c\approx 0.0107$. This result implies that the Nusselt number $Nu$, defined as the ratio of the total-to-conductive heat transport, satisfies $Nu \lesssim R^{4}$. 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 $R$.