Numerical investigations of natural convection in a square cavity-boundary conditions effects

Abstract

The effect of boundary conditions on natural convection in a square cavity is investigated using Fluent 6.3 CFD package. The square enclosure used for flow and heat transfer analysis has been bounded by adiabatic top wall, constant temperature cold vertical walls and a horizontal bottom wall. The bottom wall is subjected to convection/heat flux/linearly varying temperature. Rayleigh numbers (Ra) vary from 103 to 106 for the case of air. The methodology has been verified for the case of constant bottom wall temperature and sinusoidal temperature available in the literature. It is observed from this study that the convection boundary condition at the bottom wall gives higher Nusselt number compared to the constant heat flux and linearly varying temperature.