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Bounds on vertical heat transport for infinite-Prandtl-number Rayleigh–Bénard convection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2006

CHARLES R. DOERING
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043, USA
FELIX OTTO
Affiliation:
Institut für Angewandte Mathematik, Universit ät Bonn, 53115 Bonn, Germany
MARIA G. REZNIKOFF
Affiliation:
Institut für Angewandte Mathematik, Universit ät Bonn, 53115 Bonn, Germany Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1000, USA

Abstract

For the infinite-Prandtl-number limit of the Boussinesq equations, the enhancement of vertical heat transport in Rayleigh–Bénard convection, the Nusselt number $\hbox{\it Nu}$, is bounded above in terms of the Rayleigh number $\hbox{\it Ra}$ according to $\hbox{\it Nu}\,{\le}\,0.644 \,{\times}\hbox{\it Ra}^{{1}/{3}} [\log{\hbox{\it Ra}}]^{{1}/{3}}$ as $\hbox{\it Ra}\,{\rightarrow}\,\infty$. This result follows from the utilization of a novel logarithmic profile in the background method for producing bounds on bulk transport, together with new estimates for the bi-Laplacian in a weighted $L^{2}$ space. It is a quantitative improvement of the best currently available analytic result, and it comes within the logarithmic factor of the pure 1/3 scaling anticipated by both the classical marginally stable boundary layer argument and the most recent high-resolution numerical computations of the optimal bound on $\hbox{\it Nu}$ using the background method.

Type
Papers
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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