Natural convection inside enclosures partially heated at one side

Abstract

Paper presented at the 6th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 30 June - 2 July, 2008.

Steady laminar natural convection heat transfer inside airfilled square cavities cooled at one side and partially heated at the opposite side, is studied numerically. A computational code based on SIMPLE-C algorithm is used for the solution of the mass, momentum, and energy transfer equations. Simulations are performed for different values of the dimensionless size and location of the heater, and the Rayleigh number, whose effects on the temperature and velocity fields, and on the heat transfer rate across the cavity, are analyzed and discussed.