A NUMERICAL STUDY OF UNSTEADY NATURAL CONVECTION IN A RECTANGULAR ENCLOSURE - THE EFFECT OF COMPRESSIBILITY

摘要

A two-dimensional, mathematical model is adopted to investigate the development of buoyancy driven circulation patterns and temperature contours inside a rectangular enclosure filled with a compressible fluid (Pr=1.0). One of the vertical walls of the enclosure is kept at a higher temperature then the opposing vertical wall. The top and the bottom of the enclosure are assumed insulated. The physics based mathematical model for this problem consists of conservation of mass, momentum (two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations) and energy equations for the enclosed fluid subjected to appropriate boundary conditions. The working fluid is assumed to be compressible through a simple ideal gas relation. The governing equations are discretized using second order accurate central differencing for spatial derivatives and first order forward finite differencing for time derivatives where the computation domain is represented by a uniform orthogonal mesh. The resulting nonlinear equations are then linearized using Newton's linearization method. The set of algebraic equations that result from this process are then put into a matrix form and solved using a Coupled Modified Strongly Implicit Procedure (CMSIP) for the unknowns (primitive variables) of the problem. A numerical experiment is carried out for a benchmark case (driven cavity flow) to verify the accuracy of the proposed solution procedure. Numerical experiments are then carried out using the proposed compressible flow model to simulate the development of the buoyancy driven circulation patterns for Rayleigh numbers between 10{sup}3 and 10{sup}5. Finally, an attempt is made to determine the effect of compressibility of the working fluid by comparing the results of the proposed model to that of models that use incompressible flow assumptions together with Boussinesq approximation.