NATURAL CONVECTIVE HEAT TRANSFER IN A SHALLOW RECTANGULAR CAVITY WITH DIFFERENT END TEMPERATURES

Abstract
The present paper deals numerically with natural convective heat transfer in a confined rectangular cavity with a relatively low geometric aspect ratio H/W (ratio of the height to the width of the cavity) and different vertical-wall temperatures. The numerical calculations, performed by the upwind finite-difference method, are carried out for a confined rectangular cavity with H/W = 0.03-1, Prandtl number Pr= 1-103, and Rayleigh number Ra = 102-106. The numerical results indicate that the geometric aspect ratio significantly affects the rate of heat transfer through the fluid layer. Moreover, useful and convenient correlations of the heat transfer through the fluid layer are derived from the results.