Coupled conduction-convection problem for a cylinder in an enclosure (Q1368147)

The authors consider the problems of free convection in multidomain coupled conduction-convection formulation for a solid cylinder in either rectangular or circular enclosure filled with air. The two problems are solved numerically by an operator-splitting pseudo-time-stepping finite element method, which automatically satisfies the continuity of the interface temperatures and heat fluxes. Several important conclusions of this study are: (a) the temperature distributions in the solid and the fluid strongly depend on the paramter \(k_s/k_f\), where \(k_s\) and \(k_f\) are thermal conductivities of the solid cylinder and the fluid; (b) with a cable placed at the centre of the rectangular enclosures, most of heat transfer occurs in the lower half of the cable through a convection mechanism. At the top of the cable, heat conduction is the dominating mode of heat transfer. The local Nusselt number increases with the Rayleigh number, but only weakly depends on \(k_s/k_f\); (c) with an included cable resting on the circular enclosure, most of the convective heat transfer occurs in the upper half of the cable. However, a significant amount of the total heat transfer still takes place in the lower half of the cable through a conduction mechanism.