| Abstract: | Avellaneda and one of the authors (1], 3]) have recently established that an upper bound for the enhanced diffusivity in the large scale, long time advection-diffusion with periodic steady incompressible velocity fields has the form  where Pe is the Peclet number and  is the reciprocal of the Prandtl number. In this paper, flow fields with maximal and minimal enhanced diffusion are studied. Maximal enhanced diffusion requires that in some directions the enhanced diffusion tensor also has the lower bound . For minimal enhanced diffusion, the effect of the velocity field is to boost the enhanced diffusivity by a negligible amount that is bounded by a fixed constant times the bare diffusivity regardless of Peclet number. Stieltjes measure formulas are used to develop a simple, necessary, and sufficient condition for maximal enhanced diffusion and also to characterize minimal enhanced diffusion. It is established here that constant mean flows can have a dramatic effect on maximal and minimal enhanced diffusion. In particular, for flows in two space dimensions, an explicit criterion is developed that guarantees the surprising fact that mean flows with rational ratios typically generate maximal enhanced diffusion through interaction with an arbitrary steady periodic incompressible flow with zero mean. In contrast, a simple criterion for flows without stagnation points is developed here that guarantees that the effect of mean flows with irrational ratios on advection-diffusion in two dimensions creates minimal enhanced diffusion. The theory for the phenomena mentioned above is elementary yet mathematically rigorous. Examples are emphasized throughout this work including a discussion of enhanced diffusivity for a class of flows recently introduced by Childress and Soward 8]. The theory developed here is also supplemented by a series of numerical experiments that both verify the theoretical predictions and display interesting crossover phenomena at rather large but finite Peclet numbers. |
