Conjugate Natural Convection Heat Transfer in a Cavity with Arc-Shaped Partition with Different Materials

Abstract

In this numerical study, the effects of inserting conductive arc-shaped baffles in a differentially heated, square cavity on naturalconvection heat transfer are investigated. The baffles are made from different materials such as aluminum, steel and wood. Rayleighnumber is varied from 7·104 to 4·106. The nondimensional radius of the baffle is also varied from R=0 (without partition) to R=1.12.The Fluent commercial code with Finite volume method is used to solve the governing equations of flow and heat transfer. It isobserved that heat transfer, temperature distribution and fluid flow are affected by changing the radius of the partition with themaximum heat transfer obtained at R=1.