An Analytical Study of Natural Convective Heat Transfer within a Trapezoidal Enclosure

Abstract

The natural convection motion and the heat transfer within a trapezoidal enclosure with parallel cylindrical top and bottom walls at different temperatures and plane adiabatic sidewalls are studied. Two-dimensional natural convective fields for a range of Rayleigh numbers, up to 2.7 × 106, and enclosure tilt angles, 0 to 180 deg measured from vertical, are investigated. The Galerkin’s method of solution is applied to nonlinear form of the momentum and energy equations to determine the velocity and temperature fields. The average and local Nusselt numbers are also presented.