A new formulation of the SADI method for the prediction of natural convection flows in cavities (Q1059499)

A numerical method involving cubic splines is used to solve the classical problem of natural convection in cavities. The derivation of a new formulation of the spline alternating direction implicit method (SADI) is presented in detail. The technique developed allows the reduction of the usual block-tridiagonal matrix to three tridiagonal ones. The implementation of the method for the specific problem under consideration is also explained in detail. The advantages of such a formulation are that all the boundary conditions required by the spline method (function and its first two derivatives) may be obtained by using the basic cubic spline relations and that computational time is saved significantly. Solutions obtained for air enclosed in square cavities agree well with existing solutions. The results presented illustrate the capacity of the method to handle problems in natural convection at high Rayleigh numbers.