Natural convection analysis in vertical upright-angled triangular cavities with uniformly heated vertical wall and isothermally cooled hypotenuse

Abstract

Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Malta, 16-18 July, 2012.

Steady-state laminar natural convection in triangular enclosures is of interest in many engineering applications such as buildings and electronic equipment. This paper presents an analytical and numerical computation of laminar natural convection in vertical uprightangled triangular cavities filled with air. The vertical wall is uniformly heated; a prescribed cold temperature is assigned at the inclined wall; while the upper horizontal wall is assumed thermally insulated. The defining aperture angle φ is located at the lower vertex between the vertical and inclined walls. The finite element method is implemented to perform the computational analysis for three aperture angles φ (= 15º, 30º and 45º) and height-based Rayleigh numbers ranging from a low Ra = 0 (pure conduction) to a high 109. Numerical results are reported for the buoyant velocity and temperature fields as well as the mean convective coefficient at the heated vertical wall. The numerical computations are also focused on the determination of the value of the maximum or critical temperature along the hot vertical wall.