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Motivated by the search for sharp bounds on turbulent heat transfer as well as the design of optimal heat exchangers, we consider incompressible flows that most efficiently cool an internally heated disc. Heat enters via a distributed source, is passively advected and diffused, and exits through the boundary at a fixed temperature. We seek an advecting flow to optimize this exchange. Previous work on energy-constrained cooling with a constant source has conjectured that global optimizers should resemble convection rolls; we prove one-sided bounds on energy-constrained cooling corresponding to, but not resolving, this conjecture. In the case of an enstrophy constraint, our results are more complete: we construct a family of self-similar, tree-like ‘branching flows’ whose cooling we prove is within a logarithm of globally optimal. These results hold for general space- and time-dependent source–sink distributions that add more heat than they remove. Our main technical tool is a non-local Dirichlet-like variational principle for bounding solutions of the inhomogeneous advection–diffusion equation with a divergence-free velocity. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Mathematical problems in physical fluid dynamics (part 1)’.
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On the Optimal Design of Wall-to-Wall Heat Transport
We consider the problem of optimizing heat transport through an incompress- ible 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 one-third power of the mean enstro- phy in the advective regime. This makes rigorous a previous prediction on the near optimality of convection rolls for energy-constrained transport. On the other hand, 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 evalu- ating 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 be- tween the optimal design problems considered herein and other apparently re- lated model problems from mathematical materials science. These connections serve to motivate designs.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1813003
- PAR ID:
- 10142600
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Communications on pure and applied mathematics
- Volume:
- 72
- ISSN:
- 0010-3640
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2385–2448
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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