Combined natural convection and thermal radiation in an inclined cubical cavity with a rectangular pins attached to its active wall

Abstract

Three dimensional combined natural convection and thermal radiation in an inclined cubic enclosure with pins attached to the active wall is investigated numerically. The vertical opposing walls are heated and cooled while the other walls are assumed to be adiabatic. The governing flow, momentum equations and the radiative transfer are solved using Fluent® 6.3 CFD software. In the discretization of the convection terms, the second order upwind scheme and for the solution algorithm SIMPLE is used. The cubic enclosure is filled with air and the flow is considered to be laminar. The properties of air are assumed to be constant except for the density variation for which the Boussinesq approximation is used. The surface to surface (S2S) heat model is used as the radiation transfer model. The computations are performed for Rayleigh number in the range 103≤Ra≤106 and for the surface emissivity (ε) 0≤ε≤1 while the inclination angle is varied 0°≤φ≤75°. The mean Nusselt number for convection and radiation transfer were evaluated as a function of Rayleigh number, emissivity and inclination angle and for some cases, the fluid flow and the temperature distributions were analyzed. The results showed that the mean total and radiative Nusselt number increases monotonically with increasing Ra number and the surface emissivity.