Heatline method for the visualization of natural convection in a complicated cavity

In this paper, natural convection inside a two-dimensional cavity with a wavy right vertical wall has been carried out. The bottom wall is heated by a spatially varying temperature and other three walls are kept at constant lower temperature. The integral forms of the governing equations are solved numerically using finite-volume method in non-orthogonal body-fitted coordinate system. SIMPLE algorithm with higher-order upwinding scheme are used. The method of numerical visualization of heat transport for convective heat transfer by heatlines is studied. The heatfunction equation in the transformed plane is solved in terms of dimensionless variables. Results are presented in the form of streamlines, isotherms, heatlines, local and average Nusselt number distribution for a selected range of Rayleigh number (100–106). The results are presented for three different undulations (1–3) with different wave amplitude (0.00–0.10) and a fluid having Prandtl number 0.71.