Numerical Study on Free Convection Heat Transfer From Slender Body in a Channel

Free convective heat transfer from a heated slender body in a rectangular channel is studied in the present work. Numerical investigation has been carried out to study the fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics in a channel with heated slender body placed at the middle. The walls are assumed to be adiabatic and entrainment is provided from the environment through the openings of the channel. The two dimensional Continuity, Navier-stokes and Energy equation with Boussinesq approximation have been solved by finite difference method. Uniform grids are used in entire computational domain. The differential equations are discritized using central difference method and forward difference method. The discritized equations with proper boundary conditions are sought by SUR method. The flow field has been studied for the range of 50.0< Ra <2.5x104 and Prandtl number range of 0.1 to 5.0. Effect of locations of slender body and effect of aspect ratio have also been investigated for the locations 1.0 to 6.0 and Aspect ratio 9.98, 4.99, 3.33, 2.49, 2.0 respectively. It is observed that slender body average Nusselt Number slowly decreases with the increase of Rayleigh Number. Heating efficiency increases with the increase of Rayleigh Number and remains almost constant for the the range of Prandtl Number considered.