Combined Mixed Convection and Radiation Heat Transfer in an Obstacle Wall Mounted Lid-driven Cavity

Abstract This paper presents a numerical investigation for laminar mixed convection flow of a radiating gas in a lid-driven cavity with a rectangular-shaped obstacle attached on the bottom wall. The vertical walls of the square cavity are assumed to be adiabatic, while other walls of cavity and obstacle are kept at constant temperature. The fluid is treated as a gray, absorbing, emitting and scattering medium. The governing differential equations consisting the continuity, momentum and energy are solved numerically by the computational fluid dynamics techniques to obtain the velocity and temperature fields. Discretized forms of these equations are obtained by the finite volume method and solved using the SIMPLE algorithm. Since the gas is considered as a radiating medium, besides convection and conduction, radiative heat transfer also takes place in the gas flow. For computation of the radiative term in the gas energy equation, the radiative transfer equation is solved numerically by the discrete ordinate method. The streamline and isotherm plots and the distributions of convective, radiative and total Nusselt numbers along the bottom wall of cavity are presented. The effects of Richardson number, obstacle location, radiation–conduction parameter, optical thickness and albedo coefficient on the flow and temperature distributions are carried out. Comparison between the present numerical results with those obtained by other investigators in the cases of conduction–radiation and pure convection systems shows good consistencies.