Natural convection in a cavity with time-dependent flux boundary

Abstract

Numerical simulations have been carried out to investigate the unsteady natural convection flow in a cavity subjected to a sidewall heat flux varying sinusoidally with time. With all walls non-slip and the upper and lower boundaries and the other sidewall adiabatic, the heating and cooling produces an alternating direction natural convection boundary layer that discharges hot fluid to the top and cold fluid to the bottom of the cavity, generating a time-varying thermal stratification in the cavity interior. Scaling analysis has been conducted for different flow regimes based on the forcing frequency, with the characteristic time scales being the forcing period and the boundary layer development time. The scaling relations are then verified using the simulations, with the results showing overall good agreement with the derived scaling relations.