Natural Convection Flow and Heat Transfer in an Enclosure Containing Staggered Arrangement of Blockages

The work reported in this paper is a numerical study of airflow and heat transfer for low turbulence buoyancy-driven flow in a rectangular cavity partially filled with solid objects. The two vertical walls were maintained at constant temperatures giving a temperature differential of 42.2 °C resulting in a characteristic Rayleigh number of 1.45 × 109. Two different types of blockage arrangements were considered for analysis, and these consist of In-line and Staggered arrangements of 12 × 6 and 12 × 3 objects. In all cases, steady state flow and wall heat transfer data at the mid-height and mid-width of the cavity are presented. The flow domain displayed a stable core region and the average core temperature was found to be strongly influenced by different stacking arrangement of solid objects. In general, the staggered arrangement resulted in lower heat transfer through the surfaces which is linked with the suppression of turbulence within the boundary layers close to the surfaces.