Effect of Thermal Buoyancy on the Two-Dimensional Upward Flow and Heat Transfer Around a Square Cylinder

Abstract

The effect of aiding/opposing buoyancy on the two-dimensional upward flow and heat transfer around a heated/cooled cylinder of square cross section is studied in this work. The finite-volume-based commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software FLUENT is used for the numerical simulation. The influence of aiding/opposing buoyancy is studied for Reynolds and Richardson numbers ranges of 50 to 150 and –1 to 1, respectively, and the blockage parameters of 2% and 25%. The flow exhibits unsteady periodic characteristics in the chosen range of Reynolds numbers (except for Reynolds number of 50 and blockage parameter of 25%) for the forced convective cases (Richardson number of 0). However, the vortex shedding is observed to stop completely at some critical value of Richardson number for a particular Reynolds number, below which the shedding of vortices into the stream is quite prominent. Representative streamlines and isotherm patterns for different blockage parameters are systematically presented and discussed. The critical Richardson and average Nusselt numbers are plotted against the Reynolds and Richardson numbers, respectively, to elucidate the role of thermal buoyancy on flow and heat transfer characteristics. It is observed that the vortex shedding frequency (Strouhal number) increases with increased heating and suddenly reduces to zero at the critical Richardson number. The critical Richardson number is again found to increase with Reynolds number for a particular blockage ratio, and the higher the blockage ratio, the less is the critical Richardson number. The results obtained from the commercial solver are extensively validated with the available numerical results in the literature and an excellent agreement is observed.