Interaction Effects Between Surface Radiation and Turbulent Natural Convection in Square and Rectangular Enclosures

Abstract

The interaction effects of surface radiation with turbulent natural convection of a transparent medium in rectangular enclosures have been numerically analyzed, covering a wide range of Rayleigh number from 109 to 1012 and aspect ratio from 1 to 200. The vertical walls of the enclosure are isothermal and maintained at different temperatures. The adiabatic top and bottom walls of the enclosure have been modelled for the limiting cases of negligible or perfect conduction along their lengths. The interaction with surface radiation results in larger velocity magnitudes and turbulence levels in the vertical as well as horizontal boundary layers, leading to an increase in the convective heat transfer by ∼25 percent. Due to the asymmetrical coupling of radiation, the augmentation of convective Nusselt number of the cold wall is larger than that of the hot wall. In tall enclosures, the convective Nusselt number exhibits three distinct regimes with respect to aspect ratio, viz. the slow growth regime, the accelerated growth regime and the invariant (or saturated) regime. The augmentation of convective Nusselt number for perfectly conducting horizontal walls is found to be of similar nature to that in the case with radiation interaction.