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ON THE VALIDITY OF THE BOUSSINESQ APPROXIMATION IN A TALL
DIFFERENTIALLY HEATED CAVITY WITH WATER
D. Kizildag, I. Rodrguez, A. Oliva
Centre Tecnol`ogic de Transfer`encia de Calor (CTTC)
Universitat Polit`ecnica de Catalunya (UPC)
ETSEIAT, Colom 11, 08222, Terrassa, Barcelona, Spain
Fax: +34 93 739 89 20 E-mail: cttc@cttc.upc.edu
ABSTRACT
In the present work, the fluid flow and heat transfer inside an integrated solar collector installed on
an advanced facade are investigated. According to
Gray and Giorgini [1], the use of the Boussinesq approximation can be considered valid for variations of
thermosphysical properties up to 10 % with respect
to the mean value. In the configuration under study,
there is a variation of about 20 % in the dynamic viscosity and 15 % in the thermal expansion coefficient.
Thus, the main objective of this work is to analyse
the validity of the Boussinesq approximation for the
turbulent natural convection flow of water in a rectangular parallelepiped tank. The significance of the
Boussinesq effects is studied comparatively by means
of detailed DNS simulations.
INTRODUCTION
The natural convection flow within enclosures has attracted the attention of many researchers due to its
potential to model numerous applications of engineering interest, such as cooling of electronic devices,
air flow in buildings, heat transfer in solar collectors,
among others. The natural convection studies corresponding to the parallelepipedic enclosures can be
classified into two elementary classes: i) heating from
a horizontal wall (heating from below); ii) heating
from a vertical wall. The characteristic example of
the former case is the Rayleigh-Benard flow, however
this work will only focus on the cavities heated from
the side. This configuration is referred commonly as
the differentially heated cavity.
Th
x2
Mu = 0
u
+ C (u) u + Du + 1 Gp + f = 0
t
T
+ C (u) T + 1Cp1 kD(T) = 0
t
(1)
(2)
(3)
Tc
111111
000000
000000
111111
000000
111111
x1
(4)
Here Tm = (Th +Tc )/2 is the mean value of the temperatures of the cold and hot walls. Those assumptions
(5)
Mu = 0 (6)
u
+ C (u) u + D((T )u) +
t
b 1 0 (T )g = 0 (7)
m1 Gp
m
T
+ C (u) T + m1Cp1
m D(k(T )T) = 0 (8)
t
The temperature dependencies for (T ), k(T ) and
(T ) are taken from Furukawa.[6]
Considering the reference scales for length, time,
velocity, temperature and dynamic pressure as H,
(H 2 /)Ra0.5 , (/H)Ra0.5 , Th Tc , (/H 2 )Ra, respectively, Non-Oberbeck-Boussinesq thermal convection in the cavity is governed by the nondimensional quantities: Ra = (gm Tre f H 3 Prm )/m2 ,
Prm = m /m , and the non-dimensional thermophysical properties: = (T )/m ; k = k(T )/km ;
0
)
= mm(T
= mm(TT)re f .
m Tre f
The governing equations are discretized on a collocated unstructured grid arrangement, by means of
second-order spectro-consistent schemes [7]. Such
1000
0.00058
density
viscosity
0.00056
density (kg/m3)
0.00054
980
0.00052
970
0.0005
viscosity (Pa s)
990
mesh
960
0.00048
950
m2
m3
m4
0.00046
320
322
324
326
temperature (K)
328
330
Non-Boussinesq
(NBSQ)
m3
m4
258
770
6.80 105
1.30 103
2.54 105
314
940
6.80 105
1.06 103
2.54 105
535
1871
4.08 105
5.34 104
9.15 106
0.25
BSQ
BSQ
BSQ
NBSQ
0.2
m2
m3
m4
m2
0.15
xmin
ymin
t
m2
0.1
As the numerical effort to carry out the present simulations is too large, all the calculations here presented are restricted to two-dimensional (2D) simulations. Although 2D calculations might affect the
fluid dynamics, some of the characteristics of the flow
or the Boussinesq effects can still be captured under this assumption. It has been shown earlier by
Trias et al. [3] for a differentially heated cavity for
Rayleigh numbers up to 1010 and by Schalzl et al.
[12] for Rayleigh-Benard convection, that in general
as a rough approach to capture the general features
of the flow and especially boundary layer profiles
and Nusselt numbers, 2D simulations can be a good
approximation.
0.05
0
0
0.01
0.02
NBSQ m2
BSQ m2
BSQ m4
1600
1400
1200
Nu
1000
800
600
400
200
-0.05
0
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
-0.1
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
-0.15
BSQ
BSQ
BSQ
NBSQ
-0.2
m2
m3
m4
m2
1800
NBSQ m2
BSQ m2
BSQ m4
1600
1400
-0.25
0.13
0.135
0.14
0.145
1200
0.15
Nu
1000
800
600
400
200
0
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
y
0.4
BSQ
BSQ
BSQ
NBSQ
0.2
m2
m3
m4
m2
-0.2
-0.4
0.02
0.04
0.06
0.08
0.1
0.12
0.14
Average Nusselt
Error
259.47
244.24
222.27
16.7 %
9.8 %
-
BSQ m2
BSQ m3
BSQ m4
0.00025
vv
0.0002
0.00015
0.0001
5e-05
0
0
0.02
0.04
0.06
0.08
0.1
0.12
0.14
0.16
With regard to second order statistics, the preliminary results show significant differences (e.g. see
Figure 10 ), which could be due to the used mesh
level and time-integration period. As the solutions
of the pending cases become available with sufficient
time-integration period, more light could be shed on
the remaining topics of interest, like stratification,
detailed turbulent statistics, heat transfer and fluid
dynamics.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has been by financially supported by the
Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia, Secretara de Estado de Universidades e Investigacion, Spain (ref.
ENE2009-07689 and ENE2009-09496).
REFERENCES
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