Thermal Convection of Nanoliquid in a Double-Connected Chamber

• Main Authors: Ioan Pop, Mikhail A. Sheremet, Teodor Groşan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-03-01
• Series: Nanomaterials
• Subjects: nanoparticles; natural convection; conjugate heat transfer; heat-conducting block
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-4991/10/3/588

Thermogravitational convective thermal transmission, inside a square differentially-heated chamber with a nanoliquid, has been examined in the presence of internal adiabatic or a thermally-conducting solid body. A single-phase nanoliquid approach is employed, based on the experimentally-extracted relations for nanofluid heat conductivity and dynamic viscosity. The governing equations have been written using non-primitive parameters such as stream function and vorticity. Such approach allows a decrease in computational time due to a reduction of equation numbers. One of the main challenges in such a technique is a determining the stream function magnitude at the inner body walls. A solution of this problem has been described in detail in this paper. Computational scrutinizing has been performed by employing the finite difference technique. The mesh sensitivity analysis and comparison with theoretical and experimental results of other researchers have been included. An influence of the Rayleigh number, nanoparticles concentration, internal block size, heat conductivity ratio and non-dimensional time on nanofluid motion and energy transport has been studied.