Laminar natural convection inside shallow and slender rectangular cavities discretely heated at the bottom and cooled at the sides

Abstract

Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 1-4 July, 2007.

Steady laminar natural convection in air-filled rectangular enclosures, both shallow and slender, partially heated at the bottom wall and cooled at both sides, is studied numerically. SIMPLE-C algorithm is employed for the solution of the mass, momentum, and energy transfer equations. Simulations are performed for height-to-width aspect ratios of the cavity from 0.2 to 5, Rayleigh numbers based on the height of the cavity from 102 to 107, and values of the heated fraction of the bottom endwall between 0.2 and 1.