Effects of Heating Location and Size on Natural Convection in Partially Heated Open-Ended Enclosure by Using Lattice Boltzmann Method

Abstract

Natural convection heat transfer in an square enclosure, consisting of a partially heated west wall with east end open to ambient, is investigated numerically by using an in-house computational fluid dynamics solver based on thermal lattice Boltzmann method. In particular, the influences of Rayleigh number (103–106), heating location (bottom, middle, and top) on west wall, and dimensionless heating length (0.25–0.75) on momentum and heat transfer characteristics of air are presented and discussed. The streamline patterns show bifurcation at the lowest Rayleigh number for bottom and middle heating, whereas at the highest Rayleigh number, all heating positions yield bifurcation and elongation of flow patterns with a secondary vortex near the lower side of open end. The middle and bottom heating locations show a linear increase in Nusselt number with heater size, whereas inverse dependence is seen for top heating. The maximum heat transfer is observed in the case of middle heating. As expected, average Nusselt number increased with increasing Rayleigh number. Finally, the functional dependence of the average Nusselt number on flow governing parameters (Rayleigh number and heating length) for different heating locations is presented as a simple predictive empirical relationship.