NUMERICAL STUDY OF ENHANCED HEAT TRANSFER BY COUPLING NATURAL AND ELECTRO-CONVECTIONS IN A HORIZONTAL ENCLOSURE

摘要

The heat transfer enhancement of natural convection using an electrohydrodynamic technique inside a horizontal enclosure heated from below is studied numerically. The interactions between the electric field, flow field, and temperature field are investigated by computational fluid dynamics methods. The flow and temperature fields are affected by voltage applied to the wire electrodes. For different voltages and numbers of electrodes, it is noticed that the Nusselt number increases in all cases and the best enhancement is obtained at lower Rayleigh numbers. It is also shown that increasing the number of electrodes does not always cause an increase in the heat transfer enhancement. Actually, when the number of electrodes is equal to the number ofBenard cells, the best heat transfer enhancement is obtained.