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

Minor revisions from review. To appear in Comm. Pure Appl. Math

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• Heat Transport by Coherent Rayleigh-Bénard Convection
• Optimal bounds and extremal trajectories for time averages in nonlinear dynamical systems
• Optimal wall-to-wall transport by incompressible flows
• Optimal heat transfer enhancement in plane Couette flow
• Relationship between the methods of bounding time averages
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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Wall-to-wall optimal transport in two dimensions
• Analytical bounds on the heat transport in internally heated convection
• Bounds for internally heated convection with fixed boundary heat flux
• Bounds on heat transfer by incompressible flows between balanced sources and sinks
• Optimal cooling of an internally heated disc
• Rigorous scaling laws for internally heated convection at infinite Prandtl number
• Bounds on buoyancy driven flows with Navier-slip conditions on rough boundaries
• Bounds on the heat transfer rate via passive advection
• Enhancing wall-to-wall heat transport with unsteady flow perturbations