Limits on enstrophy growth for solutions of the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations Charles DoeringLu Lu 76D0376D0535Q30Navier-Stokes equationsfluid dynamicsvorticityenstrophy The enstrophy, the square of the $L^{2}$ norm of the vorticity field, is a key quantity for the determination of regularity and uniqueness properties for solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations. In this paper we investigate the maximal enstrophy generation rate for velocity fields with a fixed amount of enstrophy, as a function of the magnitude of the enstrophy via numerical solution of the Euler-Lagrange equations for the associated variational problem. The veracity of the novel computational scheme is established by utilizing the exactly soluble version of the problem for Burgers' equation as a benchmark. The results for the three dimensional Navier-Stokes equations are found to saturate functional estimates for the maximal enstrophy production rate as a function of enstrophy. Indiana University Mathematics Journal 2008 text pdf 10.1512/iumj.2008.57.3716 10.1512/iumj.2008.57.3716 en Indiana Univ. Math. J. 57 (2008) 2693 - 2728 state-of-the-art mathematics http://iumj.org/access/