Analytical bounds on the heat transport in internally heated convection

Abstract: We obtain an analytical bound on the mean vertical convective heat flux $\langle w T \rangle$ between two parallel boundaries driven by uniform internal heating. We consider two configurations, one with both boundaries held at the same constant temperature, and the other one with a top boundary held at constant temperature and a perfectly insulating bottom boundary. For the first configuration, Arslan et al. (J. Fluid Mech. 919:A15, 2021) recently provided numerical evidence that Rayleigh-number-dependent corrections to the only known rigorous bound $\langle w T \rangle \leq 1/2$ may be provable if the classical background method is augmented with a minimum principle stating that the fluid's temperature is no smaller than that of the top boundary. Here, we confirm this fact rigorously for both configurations by proving bounds on $\langle wT \rangle$ that approach $1/2$ exponentially from below as the Rayleigh number is increased. The key to obtaining these bounds are inner boundary layers in the background fields with a particular inverse-power scaling, which can be controlled in the spectral constraint using Hardy and Rellich inequalities. These allow for qualitative improvements in the analysis not available to standard constructions.