Rapidly rotating internally heated convection: bounds on long-time averages

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhang, Yutong, Arslan, Ali, Maffei, Stefano, Jackson, Andrew
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Zhang, Yutong
Arslan, Ali
Maffei, Stefano
Jackson, Andrew
author_facet Zhang, Yutong
Arslan, Ali
Maffei, Stefano
Jackson, Andrew
contents Convection on geophysical and astrophysical scales is subject to rapid rotation and strong heating from within the domain. In studying the long-time behaviour of the solutions for such a system, energy identities fail to capture the effects of rotation because the Coriolis force does no work, and rapid rotation can be prohibitive for direct numerical simulations. Instead, we derive an asymptotically reduced model for rapidly rotating convection driven by uniform internal heating between isothermal stress-free boundaries in a plane periodic layer. The main contribution is the proof of bounds on the mean temperature, and the mean vertical convective heat transport, in terms of the Rayleigh and Ekman numbers, in the limit of infinite Prandtl number. The first quantity represents the mixing of the flow, and the second the asymmetry in heat leaving the bottom and top boundaries due to convection, and unlike Rayleigh-Bénard convection, the two are not a priori related. We employ alternative estimation techniques to those used in previous studies (Grooms \& Whitehead, 2014 \textit{Nonlinearity}, 28, 29) and identify two distinct scaling behaviours for both quantities. Finally, our bounds are optimised, within the methodology, and provide a rigorous constraint for future studies of rotation-dominated internally heated convection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_01380
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rapidly rotating internally heated convection: bounds on long-time averages
Zhang, Yutong
Arslan, Ali
Maffei, Stefano
Jackson, Andrew
Fluid Dynamics
Geophysics
Convection on geophysical and astrophysical scales is subject to rapid rotation and strong heating from within the domain. In studying the long-time behaviour of the solutions for such a system, energy identities fail to capture the effects of rotation because the Coriolis force does no work, and rapid rotation can be prohibitive for direct numerical simulations. Instead, we derive an asymptotically reduced model for rapidly rotating convection driven by uniform internal heating between isothermal stress-free boundaries in a plane periodic layer. The main contribution is the proof of bounds on the mean temperature, and the mean vertical convective heat transport, in terms of the Rayleigh and Ekman numbers, in the limit of infinite Prandtl number. The first quantity represents the mixing of the flow, and the second the asymmetry in heat leaving the bottom and top boundaries due to convection, and unlike Rayleigh-Bénard convection, the two are not a priori related. We employ alternative estimation techniques to those used in previous studies (Grooms \& Whitehead, 2014 \textit{Nonlinearity}, 28, 29) and identify two distinct scaling behaviours for both quantities. Finally, our bounds are optimised, within the methodology, and provide a rigorous constraint for future studies of rotation-dominated internally heated convection.
title Rapidly rotating internally heated convection: bounds on long-time averages
topic Fluid Dynamics
Geophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01380