Experimental study of turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection under non-uniform heating boundary conditions

We present an experimental investigation of heat transport by turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard (RB)convection under non-uniform heating boundary conditions.During the measure-ments,the Rayleigh number Ra varies from 9×10 8 to 7×10 9 and the Prandtl number Pr is fixed at Pr=5.4.By adjusting the spatial distribution of the heating power in the lower plate,we ob-served an enhancement in the Nusselt number Nu by 13%.Therefore,our results reveal that the non-uniform heating can enhance the global heat transport efficiency of the system.