Endwall heat transfer effects on the turbulent mercury convection in a rotating cylinder

Abstract

The obtained results of direct numerical simulation of the free mercury convection in a rotating cylindrical container heated from below are presented. Setting the Prandtl number equal to 0.025 and the height-to-diameter ratio equal to 1.0, effects of container rotation and heat transfer in horizontal solid walls have been studied. The effective Rayleigh number was close to 106. The Navier–Stokes equations, written with the Boussinesq approximation, were solved using the fractional-step method. The instant and time-averaged flow fields, the pulsation spectra and the integral heat transfer data were analyzed. The in-house code SINF/Flag-S results were compared with the available experimental data, and with the data obtained using the commercial software ANSYS Fluent 15.0.