Combined natural-convection and radiation in presence of internal heat generation source in absorbing-emitting-scattering medium

Abstract

Numerical investigation of combined laminar natural convection and volumetric radiation with internal heat generation is presented in this paper and computations are performed for a grey gas-filled square cavity whose horizontal walls are adiabatic and vertical walls are differentially heated. The convection is treated under Boussinesq approximation by an approach based on finite-volumes and the volumetric radiation by the discrete ordinates method. Flow and heat transfer characteristics through isotherms, streamlines and average Nusselt numbers have been presented for an external Rayleigh number 106, internal Rayleigh number 0 to 4x1012, optical thickness 0 to 10 and Albedo 0 to 1. Representative results illustrating the effects of the optical thickness and the internal heat generation on the flow and the temperature distribution within the cavity are presented. The results reveal that the fluid flow and heat transfer are influenced significantly by the volumetric radiation and the internal heat generation. By comparing the solutions in pure convection, the results in combined convection-volumetric radiation show that when the medium is participating, the effect of internal source presence is very important.