Numerical simulation of natural convection in annuli with internal fins

Abstract

The solution for the natural convection in internally finned horizontal annuli is obtained by using a numerical simulation of time-dependent and two-dimensional governing equations. The fins existing in annuli influence the flow pattern, temperature distribution and heat transfer rate. The variations of the fin configuration suppress or accelerate the free convective effects compared to those of the smooth tubes. The effects of fin configuration, number of fins and ratio of annulus gap width to the inner cylinder radius on the fluid flow and heat transfer in annuli are demonstrated by the distribution of the velocity vector, isotherms and streamlines. The governing equations are solved efficiently by using a parallel implementation. The technique is adopted for reduction of the computation cost. The parallelization is performed with the domain decomposition technique and message passing between sub-domains on the basis of the MPI library. The results from parallel computation reveal in consistency with those of the sequential program. Moreover, the speed-up ratio shows linearity with the number of processor.