A 2D model for heat transport in a Hele-Shaw geometry (Q2238507)

It is a very interesting paper, concerning the convective 2D system (1.1), obtained from the general 3D Navier-Stokes system under forced thermal convection. The Hele-Shaw approximation is considered. A Rayleigh-Bénard cell is studied, in which the upper boundary of the Hele-Shaw cell is cooled and the lower boundary heated ``so that the dynamics within the cell evolve to a steady state''. This is due to the differences in the density, caused by differences in the temperature of the fluid. The main parameter of the fluid flow is the Rayleigh number. The thermal convection is governed by the Nusselt number. The main point is to get an existence theorem for suitable weak solutions of (1.1) with some particular boundary conditions. A second-order singularity appears in the temperature equation in (1.1). The Leray-Schauder fixed point theorem and a series of specific regularized problems are used. A careful analysis gives a numerical approximation for the strong solutions of heat transport in a Hele-Shaw geometry, by using finite elements in space and finite differences in time. Unconditional well-posedness and error estimates are obtained. Numerical simulations are performed, and the good behavior of considered schemes are proved. The main mathematical tools are: Rellich's theorem, Aubin-Lions compactness theorem, Sobolev spaces estimates, Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequality, Gronwall's inequality, the discrete inf-sup condition (3.5). In Appendix C two useful embedding lemmas are given. The above results are important improvements of the paper [\textit{J. A. Letelier} et al., J. Fluid Mech. 864, 746--767 (2019; Zbl 1415.76606)] ``where the authors investigated numerically the perturbative effects of cell aperture in heat transport and thermal dissipation rate for a vertical Hele-Shaw geometry''.