SPH modeling of natural convection around a heated horizontal cylinder: A comparison with experiments

Abstract

An experimental and numerical smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) analysis was performed for the convective flow arising from a horizontal, thin cylindrical heat source enclosed in a glycerin-filled, slender enclosure at low Rayleigh numbers ($1.18\le \mathrm{Ra}\le 242$). Both the experiments and the SPH calculations were performed for positive ($0.1\le \Delta T\le 10$ K) and negative ($-10\le \Delta T\le -0.1$ K) temperature differences between the source and the surrounding fluid. In all cases a pair of steady, counter-rotating vortices is formed, accompanied by a plume of vertically ascending flow just above the source for $\Delta T>0$ and a vertically descending flow just below the source for $\Delta T<0$. The maximum flow velocities always occur within the ascending/descending plumes. The SPH predictions are found to match the experimental observations acceptably well with root-mean-square errors in the velocity profiles of the order of $\sim 10^{-5}$ m s${}^{-1}$. The fact that the SPH method is able to reveal the detailed features of the flow phenomenon demonstrates the correctness of the approach.

24 pages, 13 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Numerical Convergence in Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics