A numerical and experimental analysis on natural convective heat transfer in a square enclosure with partially active side walls

The present study is an experimental and numerical analysis on natural convection of air in square enclosures with partially active side walls.The experimental study is carried out both through the holographic interferometry in order to obtain the average Nusselt numbers at different Rayleigh numbers.The temperature distributions in the air and the heat transfer coefficients are measured by a holographic interferometry and compared with the numerical results that are obtained with the finite volume code Fluent 12.1.4.The aim of this comparison is to investigate the influence of the size and number heat sources on the natural convective heat transfer in a square cavity.