Natural Convection Flow in a Cavity with Isoflux Boundary Condition

Abstract

The start-up and fully developed natural convection flow in a cavity subjected to isoflux heating on one sidewall, with all other walls adiabatic, is investigated via two-dimensional numerical simulation. The dominant features of the evolving flow are identified as: the development of a vertical natural convection boundary layer on the heated sidewall, heated fluid discharged as an intrusion layer beneath the upper boundary, and the formation of an approximately linear, stable, temperature stratification in the cavity core. Rayleigh number based scalings are suggested and tested for the time to full development, and for the intensity of the core stratification, validated against the numerical results, and are shown to perform well. Further investigations on the cavity with a vertical conducting partition of varying thickness were performed to study the impact on the transient flow behaviour.