Numerical Modeling of Turbulent/Transitional Natural Convection within Tilted Rectangular Cuboids Using Three RANS Based Turbulence Models
Abstract
Three-dimensional numerical analyses of turbulent/transitional natural convection in a rectangular enclosure at tilt angles of -30°, 0° and +30° and at a moderately high Rayleigh number of Ra=5×108 have been carried out using three RANS based turbulence models. The enclosure is heated from left wall and cooled from right wall and the other sides of enclosure are at adiabatic condition. The enclosures are filled by air (Pr=0.71) and the flow regime is assumed to deal with transitional to turbulent condition. Two fully turbulent models of RNGk-ε, SSTk-⍵ and one turbulence/transitional model named as Reθ–γ transition model, or SST-transition model, are utilized for computations and their predictions are compared with each other. The flow pattern, iso-surfaces of temperature, variation of heat transfer and skin friction coefficients along the heated wall and some turbulence quantities such as turbulent kinetic energy and turbulent viscosity ratio are presented in details. The results reveal that the tilt angle plays as an effective role on the flow structure and temperature distributions. Moreover, the comparisons show that the transition/turbulence model of the Reθ–γ predicted more accurate results for flow and temperature fields than two other turbulence models.
Keywords: Natural convection; Turbulence/transition models; Tilted enclosure; Three-dimensional flow
- Introduction
Natural convection in a rectangular enclosure is an interesting fundamental problem and has been extensively studied both experimentally and numerically by investigators. The issue of natural convection within the enclosures has wide applications at industries, such as: cooling of electrical and electronic equipment, aeronautics, civil engineering, nuclear energy, solar collector, food industry [1-5].