Natural convection in a cavity with time-dependent flux boundary

Abstract

Numerical simulations have been carried out to investigate the unsteady natural convection flow in a cavity subjected to a sidewall heat flux varying sinusoidally with time. With all walls non-slip and the upper and lower boundaries and one sidewall adiabatic, the heating and cooling on the other sidewall produces an alternating direction natural convection boundary layer that discharges hot fluid to the top and cold fluid to the bottom of the cavity, generating a strong and time-varying thermal stratification in the cavity interior. The thermal stratification is shown to be strongly dependent on the forcing frequency.