Rigorous upper limits on the vertical heat transport in two-dimensional Rayleigh-Bénard convection between stress-free isothermal boundaries are derived from the Boussinesq approximation of the Navier-Stokes equations. The Nusselt number Nu is bounded in terms of the Rayleigh number Ra according to Nu≤0.2891Ra(5/12) uniformly in the Prandtl number Pr. This scaling challenges some theoretical arguments regarding asymptotic high Rayleigh number heat transport by turbulent convection.

Obtaining pressure field data from particle image velocimetry (PIV) is an attractive technique in fluid dynamics due to its noninvasive nature. The application of this technique generally involves integrating the pressure gradient or solving the pressure Poisson equation using a velocity field measured with PIV. However, very little research has been done to investigate the dynamics of error propagation from PIV-based velocity measurements to the pressure field calculation. Rather than measure the error through experiment, we investigate the dynamics of the error propagation by examining the Poisson equation directly. We analytically quantify the error bound in the pressure field, and are able to illustrate the mathematical roots of why and how the Poisson equation based pressure calculation propagates error from the PIV data. The results show that the error depends on the shape and type of boundary conditions, the dimensions of the flow domain, and the flow type.

Rigorous bounds on heat transport are derived for thermal convection between stress-free horizontal plates. For three-dimensional Rayleigh-Bénard convection at infinite Prandtl number (Pr), the Nusselt number (Nu) is bounded according to Nu 0.28764Ra 5/12 where Ra is the standard Rayleigh number. For convection driven by a uniform steady internal heat source between isothermal boundaries, the spatially and temporally averaged (non-dimensional) temperature is bounded from below by T 0.6910R −5/17 in three dimensions at infinite Pr and by T 0.8473R −5/17 in two dimensions at arbitrary Pr, where R is the heat Rayleigh number proportional to the injected flux.

We derive an improved rigorous lower bound on the space and time averaged temperature T of an infinite Prandtl number Boussinesq fluid contained between isothermal no-slip boundaries thermally driven by uniform internal heating. A novel approach is used wherein a singular stable stratification is introduced as a perturbation to a non-singular background profile, yielding the estimatewhere R is the heat Rayleigh number. The analysis relies on a generalized Hardy-Rellich inequality that is proved in the appendix.

We consider the Boussinesq approximation for Rayleigh-Bénard convection perturbed by an additive noise and with boundary conditions corresponding to heating from below. In two space dimensions, with sufficient stochastic forcing in the temperature component and large Prandtl number P r > 0, we establish the existence of a unique ergodic invariant measure. In three space dimensions, we prove the existence of a statistically invariant state, and establish unique ergodicity for the infinite Prandtl Boussinesq system. Throughout this work we provide streamlined proofs of unique ergodicity which invoke an asymptotic coupling argument, a delicate usage of the maximum principle, and exponential martingale inequalities. Lastly, we show that the background method of Constantin-Doering [CD96] can be applied in our stochastic setting, and prove bounds on the Nusselt number relative to the unique invariant measure.