Simulation of natural convection in a differentially heated cavity

Abstract

Buoyancy-driven flow in a cavity can be observed in many application of thermal engineering, such as nuclear reactor insulation, ventilation of rooms, solar energy absorber, crystal growth, cooling of electronics chips, and cooling of steel or iron bars. Buoyancy-driven flow in a cavity has been studied using different solution methods. Validity of these numerical studies is performed by well-known benchmark problems. Differentially heated square cavity is one of the most widely used benchmark problems in convection-diffusion problems. In this study, the differentially heated cavity problem is modeled using control-volume method using different solution algorithms (QUICK and Upwind). The case matrix is formed (i.e. for different Ra number and for different mesh sizes) for this problem and the results are compared with the available solutions found in literature. The CPU time for the computations for the different cases with different solution algorithms are also given.