Bounds on heat transfer by incompressible flows between balanced sources and sinks

Internally heated convection involves the transfer of heat by fluid motion between a distribution of sources and sinks. Focusing on the balanced case where the total heat added by the sources matches the heat taken away by the sinks, we obtain a priori bounds on the minimum mean thermal dissipation 〈|∇T|2〉 as a measure of the inefficiency of transport. In the advective limit, our bounds scale with the inverse mean kinetic energy of the flow. The constant in this scaling law depends on the source–sink distribution, as we explain both in a pair of examples involving oscillatory or concentrated heating and cooling, and via a general asymptotic variational principle for optimizing transport. Key to our analysis is the solution of a pure advection equation, which we do to find examples of extreme heat transfer by cellular and ‘pinching’ flows. When the flow obeys a momentum equation, our bound is re-expressed in terms of a flux-based Rayleigh number R yielding 〈|∇T|2〉≥CR−α. The power α is 0,2/3 or 1 depending on the arrangement of the sources and sinks relative to gravity. •Bounds are proved on convective heat transfer between balanced sources and sinks.•Nearly optimal flows are constructed for sinusoidal and point-like heating.•A Hardy space norm is used to address point-like heating in an optimal way.•A variational principle is derived for optimal flows in the advective limit.•Bounds on internally heated buoyancy-driven convection are deduced.