Laminar and turbulent natural convection in 2D-square cavities

Abstract

Natural convection in cavities has many important applications in industry, such as cooling of microelectronic circuits, building isolations, fire control, among them. The knowledge of the most important factors that controls the flow pattern inside the cavities is helpful as long as it gives the right tools to project and analyze any equipment based in natural convection. In this work, the Rayleigh number is varied in such way that laminar and turbulent fluid flows, in two-dimensional square cavities, are presented. The numerical analysis is performed using the ANSYS CFX® software. Two turbulent models: k-ε and k-ω are used for simulating the natural convection in the turbulent regime. All the simulations are performed in a two-dimensional square cavity with two adiabatic walls and two uniform heated walls, for several Rayleigh numbers and inclinations of the cavity. The results are presented in terms of isotherms, streamlines and average Nusselt number for Prandtl number equal to 0.7.