Convection driven by internal heat sources and sinks: heat transport beyond the mixing-length or "ultimate" scaling regime

Thermal convection driven by internal heat sources and sinks was recently shown experimentally to exhibit the mixing-length, or "ultimate", scaling-regime: the Nusselt number $Nu$ (dimensionless heat flux) increases as the square-root of the Rayleigh-number $Ra$ (dimensionless internal temperature difference). While for standard Rayleigh-Bénard convection this scaling regime was proven to be a rigorous upper bound on the Nusselt number, we show that this is not so for convection driven by internal sources and sinks. To wit, we introduce an asymptotic expansion to derive steady nonlinear solutions in the limit of large $Ra_Q$, the Rayleigh-number based on the strength of the heat source. We illustrate this procedure for a simple sinusoidal heat source and show that it achieves heat transport enhancement beyond the mixing-length scaling regime: $Nu$ increases linearly with $Ra$ over this branch of solutions. Using rigorous upper bound theory, we prove that the scaling regime $Nu \sim Ra$ of the asymptotic solution corresponds to a maximization of the heat flux subject to simple dynamical constraints, up to a dimensionless prefactor. Not only do 2D numerical simulations confirm the analytical solution for the sinusoidal source, but, more surprisingly, they indicate that it is stable and indeed achieved by the system up to the highest $Ra_Q$ investigated numerically, with a heat transport efficiency orders of magnitude higher than the standard mixing-length estimate.