Numerical simulation of natural convection in a differentially heated cubical cavity with solid fins

Purpose

The performance of solid fins inside a differentially heated cubical cavity is numerically studied in this paper. The main purpose of the study is to make an optimization to reach the maximum heat transfer in the enclosure having the solid fins with studied parameters.

Design/methodology/approach

The considered domain of interest is a differentially heated cube having heat-conducting solid fins placed on the heated wall while an opposite wall is a cooled one. Other walls are adiabatic. Governing equations describing natural convection in the fluid filled cube and heat conduction in solid fins have been written using non-dimensional variables such velocity and vorticity taking into account the Boussinesq approximation for the buoyancy force and ideal solid/fluid interfaces between solid fins and fluid. The formulated equations with appropriate initial and boundary conditions have been solved by the finite difference method of the second of accuracy. The developed in-house computational code has been validated using the mesh sensitivity analysis and numerical data of other authors. Analysis has been performed in a wide range of key parameters such as Rayleigh number (Ra = 10⁴–10⁶), non-dimensional fins length (l = 0.2–0.8), non-dimensional location of fins (d = 0.2–0.6) and number of fins (n = 1–3).

Findings

From numerical methods point of view the used non-primitive variables allows to perform numerical simulation of convective heat transfer in three-dimensional (3D) regions with two advantages, namely, excluding difficulties that can be found using vector potential functions and reducing the computational time compared to primitive variables and SIMPLE-like algorithms. From a physical point of view, it has been shown that using solid fins can intensify the heat transfer performance compared to cavities without any fins. Fins located close to the bottom wall of the cavity have a better heat transfer rate than those placed close to the upper cavity surface. At high Rayleigh numbers, increasing the fins length beyond 0.6 leads to a reduction of the average Nusselt number, and one solid fin can be used to intensify the heat transfer.

Originality/value

The present numerical study is based on hybrid approach for numerical analysis of convective heat transfer using velocity and vorticity that has some mentioned advantages. Obtained results allow intensifying the heat transfer using solid fins in 3D chambers with appropriate location and length.