Combined heat transfer of radiation and forced convection flow of participating gases in a three-dimensional recess

Abstract

This research work presents a numerical investigation of three-dimensional combined convection-radiation heat transfer over a recess including two inclined steps in a horizontal duct. To simulate the inclined surface boundaries, the blocked off method is employed for both fluid mechanic and radiation problems. The fluid is treated as a gray, absorbing, emitting and scattering medium. In numerical solution of the governing equations including conservation of mass, momentum and energy, the three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system is used. These equations are solved numerically using the CFD techniques to obtain the temperature and velocity fields. Discretized forms of the governing equations are obtained by the finite volume method and solved using the SIMPLE algorithm. Since the gas is considered as a radiating medium, all of the convection, conduction and radiation terms are presented in the energy equation. For computation of radiative term in energy equation, the radiative transfer equation (RTE) is solved numerically by the discrete ordinates method (DOM) to find the divergence of radiative heat flux distribution inside the radiating medium. The effects of radiation-conduction parameter, optical thickness and albedo coefficient on heat transfer behavior of the system are presented. Comparison of numerical results with the available data published in open literature shows a good agreement.