Natural Convection in Enclosures

TLDR

Natural convection in enclosures exhibits diverse buoyancy flows that pose challenging physical and mathematical problems, involving complex coupling between flow, transport, boundary layers, core flows, driving forces, and sub‑regions such as cells and layers. The study emphasizes the importance of scaling analysis and experiments to determine flow details and outlines the essentials of scaling techniques. The authors discuss representative works covering a broad range of problems and detail the scaling techniques used to analyze them. The implications for numerical methods are presented, revealing that purely numerical solutions are inadequate for capturing the complex buoyancy phenomena.

Abstract

There exists a great diversity of buoyancy flows in enclosures that are of interest in science and technology. These buoyancy flows pose new and challenging physical and mathematical problems. Emphasis is given to the complexities of the phenomena, viz., the coupling of the flow and transport and of the boundary-layer and core flows, the interaction between the flow and the driving force, which alters the regions in which the buoyancy acts, and the occurrence of flow sub-regions (cells and layers). The importance of scaling analysis and experiments to determine flow details are discussed and the essentials of scaling techniques are outlined. The implications of these for numerical methods are presented, and the inadequacies of purely numerical solutions are pointed out. Representative works covering a broad range of problems are discussed.