Numerical Study of Convective Heat Transfer of Multiple Internal Isolated Blocks in an Enclosure

Abstract

The treatment of Convective Heat Transfer Coefficients (CHTCs) in an enclosure has a significant impact on the thermal design of electronic appliance, especially the CHTCs in an enclosure with internal isolated blocks. The CHTCs of the isolated blocks for pure natural convection are usually used, while it may not be applicable to any practice. Combined convective heat transfer, even forced convective heat transfer, is sometime more applicable in reality. In our present work, first of all, validation of the turbulence model for CFD simulation of natural convective flows in a square enclosure is performed. The values of CHTCs for vertical walls obtained by using a low Reynolds k-ε model agree well with the existed correlations. The simulation also indicates that the distance from the first grid to the wall has a significant impact on the CHTCs. Using this low Reynolds k-ε model, computer simulations of natural and forced convective heat transfer within a square enclosure containing ten isolated blocks are performed. For both the natural and forced convection, the dimensionless Nusselt numbers are derived by the obtained results. For the case of mixed convection, the CHTCs are established by blending those for natural and forced convection using the Churchill-Usagi approach, which is a general expression combines the asymptotic solutions of independent CHTCs into the mixed convection by using a Churchill-Usagi blending coefficient.