On the thermal performance of an internally finned three-dimensional cubic enclosure in natural convection

The present paper evaluates the effect of the aspect ratio and horizontal length of a high conductivity rectangular fin attached to the hot wall of a three-dimensional differentially heated cubic enclosure in laminar natural convection. The objective is the augmentation of the heat transfer delivered from the heated wall to the fluid when the volume fraction of the fin is fixed. Two different values for the fin volume were considered: (i) a large fin that occupies 10 percent of the cubic enclosure, and (ii), a much smaller fin that occupies only 0.1 percent of the enclosure total volume. The finite element technique was applied for solving the coupled steady-state velocity and temperature fields in the 3-D domain in the range 103