Date of Award

Summer 1987

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

Program/Concentration

Mechanical Engineering

Committee Director

S. K. Chaturvedi

Committee Member

A. S. Roberts

Committee Member

S. N. Tiwari

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E56M63

Abstract

The natural convective heat transfer in closed and vented cavities has been studied numerically, using the primitive variables formulation. A two-and three-dimensional enclosure, and a two-dimensional Trombe Wall channel geometries are considered. The flow has been assumed to remain Laminar, and Boussinesq approximation is invoked for solving the governing equations, The finite-difference method used in this study, is based on the SIMPLER algorithm which uses a combination of central and upwind differencing scheme to obtain stable numerical results.

For both geometries, namely the closed and vented cavities, the fundamental nature of the fluid dynamic and heat transfer characteristics is revealed by generating the contour maps of temperature and the flow field, The flow patterns and isotherms are obtained for aspect ratios from 1 to 20 and Rayleigh number ranging from 103 to 106. For both geometries, the flow patterns are strongly influenced by Rayleigh number.

For the open channel case, the investigation showed that the net energy delivered to the conditioned space is strongly governed by Ra and Ar, and the mass flux shows a maximum value and then decreases as Ra increases. Also, increasing the Rayleigh number enlarges and intensifies recirculating motion in the channel. For the limited number of three dimensional cases, the results obtained from the present computer code are in agreement with results cited in the literature.

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DOI

10.25777/48qb-gr61

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