INVERSE FORCED CONVECTION PROBLEM OF SIMULTANEOUS ESTIMATION OF TWO BOUNDARY HEAT FLUXES IN IRREGULARLY SHAPED CHANNELS

This article deals with the use of the conjugate gradient method of function estimation for the simultaneous identification of two unknown boundary heat fluxes in channels with laminar flows. The irregularly shaped channel in the physical domain is transformed into a parallel plate channel in the computational domain by using an elliptic scheme of numerical grid generation. The direct problem, as well as the auxiliary problems and the gradient equations, required for the solution of the inverse problem with the conjugate gradient method are formulated in terms of generalized boundary-fitted coordinates. Therefore, the solution approach presented here can be readily applied to forced convection boundary inverse problems in channels of any shape. Direct and auxiliary problems are solved with finite volumes. The numerical solution for the direct problem is validated by comparing the results obtained here with benchmark solutions for smoothly expanding channels. Simulated temperature measurements containing random errors are used in the inverse analysis for strict cases involving functional forms with discontinuities and sharp corners for the unknown functions. The estimation of three different types of inverse problems are addressed in the paper: (i) time-dependent heat fluxes; (ii) spatially dependent heat fluxes; and (iii) time and spatially dependent heat fluxes.     

The Improved Direct Collocation Meshless Approach for Radiative Heat Transfer in Participating Media

The moving least-squares (MLS) direct collocation meshless method (DCM) is an effective numerical scheme for solving the radiative heat transfer in participating media. In this method the trial function is constructed by a MLS approximation and the radiative transfer equation (RTE) is discretized directly at nodes by collocation. The main drawback of this method is that, like most of the other numerical methods, the solution to the RTE by the DCM also suffers much from nonphysical oscillations in some cases caused by the convection-dominated property of the RTE. To overcome the numerical oscillations, special stabilization techniques are usually adopted, which increases the complexity and computation time of problem. In the present work a new scheme based on the outflow-boundary intensity interpolation correction is proposed that can easily ensure a large reduction in numerical oscillations of results without any complex stabilization technique. Adaptive support domain technique is also adopted, and the size of the support domain of each evaluated point changes with the density of nodes with irregular distribution. Five cases are studied to illustrate the numerical performance of these improvements. The numerical results compare well with the benchmark approximate solutions, and it is shown that the improved moving least-square direct collocation meshless method (iDCM) is easily implemented, efficient, of high accuracy, and excellent stability, to solve radiative heat transfer in homogeneous participating media.     

Benchmark solutions for natural convection in a cubic cavity using the high-order time-space method

Benchmark numerical solutions for a three-dimensional natural convection heat transfer problem in a cubical cavity are presented in this paper. The 3-D cavity has two differentially heated and isothermal vertical walls and also four adiabatic walls. The computations are conducted for three Rayleigh numbers of 10⁴, 10⁵ and 10⁶. The filled fluid is with air and the Prandtl number is fixed at 0.71. The computed results are efficiently obtained by using the time-space method, which was proposed by Saitoh (1991) as a highly efficient and fast solver for general heat transfer and fluid flow problems. In our computations, the high-accuracy finite differences of a fourth-order were employed for the spatial discretization of governing equations and boundary conditions. In addition the third-order backward finite difference was used in timewise discretization. The resultant converged flow and temperature characteristics are also presented. The spatial grid dependency of the solutions was examined on a uniform grid. In addition, the grid-independent benchmark solutions were obtained by Richardson extrapolation for three cases. The present benchmark solutions will be useful for checking the performance and accuracy of any numerical methodologies.     

Periodic heat transfer through inhomogeneous media. Part 1. Slab

The paper presents exact analytical solutions of one-dimensional periodic heat conduction through an inhomogeneous slab for a certain class of thermal conductivity profiles (including linear and exponential). The exact analytical solutions for some of these profiles have been compared with those obtained by considering the slab to be made up of a number of homogeneous layers with different thermal conductivities varying from layer to layer and using the layered structure (or matrix multiplication) method. The numerical results arrived at by the layered-structure method converge rapidly (with increasing number of layers considered) to the values obtained from the exact analytical solutions. This gives confidence in the application of the layered-structure method to periodic heat conduction through inhomogeneous slabs. The numerical results have been presented in the form of elements of a 2 × 2 matrix, relating the sinusoidal steady-state temperature and heat flux on the two sides of the slab.     

Experimental Validation of the Multiple Absorption Coefficient Zonal Method (MACZM) in a Dynamic Modeling of a Steel Reheating Furnace

In this work, the multiple absorption coefficient zonal method (MACZM) is being implemented and validated numerically. The method is demonstrated to be highly suitable for the analysis of radiative heat transfer in multidimensional inhomogeneous non-grey media. A uniform rectangular fine grid is considered and small CPU time is achieved. This makes the method of great interest for transient applications. The validity of the method is demonstrated in two steps. First, cases with simple geometry are considered and results are compared to results generated by direct numerical integration. Results are also generated by MODRAY, which is a source project based on an original method called the flux-planes approximation, and are shown to be equally accurate. Second, the case of a steel reheating furnace is considered. In a previous work, the furnace heat balance and temperature profiles were simulated using a finite difference computation approach and radiative exchange factors generated by MODRAY. Experiments were performed and results generated by the model were found to be in good agreement with experimental data. The radiative exchange factors are now recalculated with MACZM. They are shown to be very close to those generated by MODRAY. The comparison of the two methods clearly shows that MACZM is much faster for the calculation of the volume-volume radiative exchange factors on a uniform rectangular grid.     

GREEN'S FUNCTIONS FOR A STEADY HEAT SOURCE IN A TWO-PHASE TRANSVERSELY ISOTROPIC ELASTIC SOLID

Based on the three-dimensional anisotropic thermoelasticity theory, Green's function solutions are presented for a steady heat source in a two-phase transversely isotropic solid. The mirror reflection method is used and a general expression of the solutions in the Cartesian coordinate system is obtained. It is also shown that the solution includes the special cases of a homogeneous transversely isotropic elastic solid of infinite space and of semi-infinite space. In addition, numerical examples for the titanium-zinc composites are given.     

Periodic heat transfer through inhomogeneous media part 3: Hollow sphere

The paper presents the exact analytical solutions for periodic radial heat conduction through an inhomogeneous hollow sphere for a certain class of thermal-conductivity profile. The exact analytical solutions for some of these profiles, (including linear and quadratic) have been compared with those obtained by considering the spherical medium to be made up of a number of homogeneous layers with different thermal conductivities, varying from layer to layer, and using the layered-structure (or matrix-multiplication) method. The numerical results arrived at by the layered-structure method converge rapidly (with increasing number of layers considered) to the values obtained from the exact analytical solutions. It strengthens the confidence in applying the layered-structure method to the case of periodic heat conduction through an inhomogeneous hollow cylinder. Considering the inhomogeneous conducting medium to be made up of a number of spherical layers with a linear profile of thermal conductivity has been shown to be a more effective alternative method of accounting for any type of inhomogeniety; and it saves computation time, as the rate of convergence is much higher than for the homogeneous-layered structure method. The numerical results have been presented in the form of elements of a 2 × 2 matrix, relating the sinusoidal steady-state temperature and heat flux of the two surfaces of the hollow sphere.     

Periodic heat transfer through inhomogeneous media part 2: Hollow cylinder

The paper presents exact analytical solutions for periodic radial heat conduction through an inhomogeneous hollow circular cylinder for a certain class of thermal conductivity profile. The exact analytical solutions for some of these profiles (including linear and quadratic) are compared with those obtained by considering the cylindrical medium to be made up of a number of homogeneous layers with different thermal conductivities, varying from layer to layer, and using the layered-structure (or matrix-multiplication) method. The numerical results arrived at by the layered-structure method converge rapidly (with increasing number of layers considered) to the values obtained from the exact analytical solutions. This gives confidence in the application of the layered-structure method to periodic heat conduction through an inhomogeneous hollow cylinder. Assuming the inhomogeneous hollow cylinder to be made up of a number of cylindrical layers with a linear profile of thermal conductivity has also been shown to be a more effective alternative method of considering any type of inhomogeniety; it saves computation time, as the rate of converegence is much higher than for the homogeneous-layer structure method. Numerical results are presented in the form of elements of a 2 × 2 matrix, relating the sinusoidal steady-state temperature and the heat flux on the two sides of the cylinder.     

Explicit analytical solutions of 2-D laminar natural convection

There are many natural convection processes in various fields, and it is still a hot topic to investigate the fluid dynamics and heat transfer of natural convection. The analytical solutions are meaningful in both theoretical investigation and practical applications. Specially, they are very useful to computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer as the benchmark solutions to check the numerical solutions and to develop numerical differencing schemes, grid generation methods and so forth. Two explicit analytical solutions of 2-D steady laminar natural convection along a vertical porous plate and between two vertical plates were derived for better understanding the flow and heat transfer as well as promoting the computational fluid dynamics and computational heat transfer.     

Solution of incompressible fluid flow problems with heat transfer by means of an efficient RBF-FD meshless approach

The localized radial basis function collocation meshless method (LRBFCMM), also known as radial basis function generated finite differences (RBF-FD) meshless method, is employed to solve time-dependent, two-dimensional (2D) incompressible fluid flow problems with heat transfer using multiquadric RBFs. A projection approach is employed to decouple the continuity and momentum equations for which a fully implicit scheme is adopted for the time integration. The node distributions are characterized by non-Cartesian node arrangements and large sizes, i.e., in the order of 10⁵ nodes, while nodal refinement is employed where large gradients are expected, i.e., near the walls. Particular attention is given to the accurate and efficient solution of unsteady flows at high Reynolds or Rayleigh numbers, in order to assess the capability of this specific meshless approach to deal with practical problems. Three benchmark test cases are considered: a lid-driven cavity, a differentially heated cavity and a flow past a circular cylinder between parallel walls. The obtained numerical results compare very favorably with literature references for each of the considered cases. It is concluded that the presented numerical approach can be employed for the efficient simulation of fluid-flow problems of engineering relevance over complex-shaped domains.     

TRANSIENT THERMAL STRESSES IN A FINITE CYLINDER OF NONUNIFORM CROSS SECTION

Boundary fitted coordinate variables are used to map the region of interest into a square. The governing transient heat conduction and displacement equilibrium equations are rewritten in terms of the new coordinate variables and are solved by a direct power series approach through the application of the Lanczos-Chebyshev and the discrete least squares methods. A finite cylindrical cone section is used to demonstrate how numerical solutions can be obtained     

Use of inverse modelling techniques for the estimation of heat transfer coefficients to fluids in cylindrical conduits

We propose a method for the estimation of the overall heat transfer coefficient to/from a fluid in a cylindrical pipe at high Peclet numbers from/to a medium with unknown temperature profile in the axial direction. The method uses an analytical solution of the heat equation in cylindrical coordinates subject to a Robin boundary condition and a parametrised, piecewise linear approximation of the external temperature profile. The velocity profiles of both viscous and turbulent flows are considered and compact solutions of the temperature profile of the fluid are evaluated in both cases as functions of the heat transfer coefficient and of the unknown external temperature profile.It is shown that these solutions provide an efficient method for the estimation of the heat transfer coefficient from fluid temperature data based on separable least squares. The overall procedure is illustrated by a numerical example using simulated data.     

A least squares method for a longitudinal fin with temperature dependent internal heat generation and thermal conductivity

Approximate but highly accurate solutions for the temperature distribution, fin efficiency, and optimum fin parameter for a constant area longitudinal fin with temperature dependent internal heat generation and thermal conductivity are derived analytically. The method of least squares recently used by the authors is applied to treat the two nonlinearities, one associated with the temperature dependent internal heat generation and the other due to temperature dependent thermal conductivity. The solution is built from the classical solution for a fin with uniform internal heat generation and constant thermal conductivity. The results are presented graphically and compared with the direct numerical solutions. The analytical solutions retain their accuracy (within 1% of the numerical solution) even when there is a 60% increase in thermal conductivity and internal heat generation at the base temperature from their corresponding values at the sink temperature. The present solution is simple (involves hyperbolic functions only) compared with the fairly complex approximate solutions based on the homotopy perturbation method, variational iteration method, and the double series regular perturbation method and offers high accuracy. The simple analytical expressions for the temperature distribution, the fin efficiency and the optimum fin parameter are convenient for use by engineers dealing with the design and analysis of heat generating fins operating with a large temperature difference between the base and the environment.     

Six Convective Difference Schemes on Different Grid Systems for Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer with SIMPLE Algorithm

INTRODUCTIONThe evaluations of the dependent variables at thecell faces are sensitive to the aChievement of accurate and economical numerical solutions of fluid flowin the finite volume method with both staggered andcollocated grids, and many difference schemes wereproposed for this purpose during the past decades.Among them there are several ones being widely used,discussed and investigated concerning their numerical performance and/or char.cteristics[1-5]. Theseschemes are central diffe…     

A Hybrid Procedure for the Sequential Estimation of Surface Heat Flux From Measurements of Surface Temperature

The sequential estimation of surface heat flux from discrete and noisy data of surface temperature is an ill-posed problem. From Duhamel's theorem and Fourier's law and using a stabilization technique based on the sequential application of the ordinary least squares (SOLS), we obtain a relatively simple but effective method. As the SOLS method uses a least squares fit over r-future and r-past temperatures, this method can be compared with the well-known function specification method (FSM). FSM is a more general method, but the numerical validations considered in this study reveal that the SOLS method gives better results. It is also shown that SOLS cannot be guided by the residual principle and consequently cannot be used in a practical scope. The ultimate goal of this study is to obtain a reliable estimation of heat flux history in an on-line industrial process where the tuneable parameter should be a time-variable r-value and it must be automatically updated from the experimental data. This requires that (i) the corresponding SOLS algorithm must be rewritten in recursive form, (ii) the classical definition of the residual principle is rewritten in recursive form, and (iii) the estimates are obtained from a hybrid procedure based on SOLS and FSM.     

A multidomain multigrid pseudospectral method for incompressible flows

Pseudospectral method has the merit of high accuracy and the defects of simple geometry suitability and low computational efficiency. To remedy the two defects, a multidomain multigrid Chebyshev pseudospectral method is proposed and validated through the numerical solution of two-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in the primitive variable formulation. To facilitate the implementation of the multidomain multigrid method, the IP_N-IP_N method is utilized to approximate the velocity and pressure with the same degree of Chebyshev polynomials within each subdomain, and an interface/boundary condensation method is developed to implement the pseudospectral operators of multigrid at the interface/boundary of subdomains. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method are first validated by numerical solutions of the lid-driven cavity problem. The numerical results are in good agreement with the benchmark solutions, and the speeding up of multigrid is 4–9 compared against the single grid. Then the capability of the proposed method for even more complex geometries with a close/open boundary is demonstrated by numerical solutions of several typical problems. The proposed method is quite generic and can be extended to the high accuracy and efficiency solution of three-dimensional incompressible/compressible, unsteady/steady fluid flows and heat transfer problems.     

A hybrid Green’s function method for the hyperbolic heat conduction problems

The present study is devoted to propose a hybrid Green’s function method to investigate the hyperbolic heat conduction problems. The difficulty of the numerical solutions of hyperbolic heat conduction problems is the numerical oscillation in the vicinity of sharp discontinuities. In the present study, we have developed a hybrid method combined the Laplace transform, Green’s function and ε-algorithm acceleration method for solving time dependent hyperbolic heat conduction equation. From one- to three-dimensional problems, six different examples have been analyzed by the present method. It is found from these examples that the present method is in agreement with the Tsai-tse Kao’s solutions [Tsai-tse Kao, Non-Fourier heat conduction in thin surface layers, J. Heat Transfer 99 (1977) 343–345] and does not exhibit numerical oscillations at the wave front. The propagation of the two- and three-dimensional thermal wave becomes so complicated because it occur jump discontinuities, reflections and interactions in these numerical results of the problem and it is difficult to find the analytical solutions or the result of other study to compare with the solutions of the present method.     

A NEW BENCHMARK QUALITY SOLUTION FOR THE BUOYANCY-DRIVEN CAVITY BY DISCRETE SINGULAR CONVOLUTION

This article introduces a high-accuracy discrete singular convolution (DSC) for the numerical simulation of coupled convective heat transfer problems. The problem of a buoyancy-driven cavity is solved by two completely independent numerical procedures. One is a quasi-wavelet-based DSC approach, which uses the regularized Shannon's kernel, while the other is a standard form of the Galerkin finite-element method. The integration of the Navier-Stokes and energy equations is performed by employing velocity correction-based schemes. The entire laminar natural convection range of 10 3 h Ra h 10 8 is numerically simulated by both schemes. The reliability and robustness of the present DSC approach is extensively tested and validated by means of grid sensitivity and convergence studies. As a result, a set of new benchmark quality data is presented. The study emphasizes quantitative, rather than qualitative comparisons.     

GDQ Method for Natural Convection in a Cubic Cavity Using Velocity–Vorticity Formulation

ABSTRACT

Natural convection in a differentially heated cubic enclosure is studied by solving the velocity–vorticity form of the Navier–Stokes equations by a generalized differential quadrature (GDQ) method. The governing equations in the form of velocity Poisson equations, vorticity transport equations, and energy equation are solved using a coupled numerical scheme via a single global matrix for velocities, vorticities, and temperature. Vorticity and velocity coupling at the solid boundaries is enforced through a higher-order approximation by the GDQ method, thus assuring accurate satisfaction of the continuity equation. Nusselt numbers computed for Ra = 10³, 10⁴, 10⁵, and 10⁶ show good agreement with the benchmark results. A mesh independence study indicates that the present numerical procedure requires much coarse mesh compared to other numerical schemes to produce the benchmark solutions of the flow and heat transfer problems.     

Solution of the radiative integral transfer equations in rectangular participating and isotropically scattering inhomogeneous medium

Radiative integral transfer equations for a rectangular participating and isotropically scattering inhomogeneous medium are solved numerically for the incident energy and the net partial heat fluxes using the method of “subtraction of singularity”. All the relevant single (surface integrals) and double integrals (volume integrals) are carried out analytically to reduce the computation time and numerical integration errors. The resulting system of linear equations are solved iteratively. A benchmark problem is chosen as a rectangular inhomogeneous cold participating medium which is subject to externally uniform diffuse radiation on the bottom surface. Solutions for linearly and quadratically varying scattering albedos are provided in tabular form.