FLOW AND HEAT TRANSFER IN RECTANGULAR ENCLOSURES USING A NEW BLOCK-IMPLICIT NUMERICAL METHOD

This work reports a numerical investigation on buoyancy-induced flows occurring in enclosures of small aspect ratio and inclined with respect to the horizontal direction. The numerical method used consists of the control-volume approach and a new block-implicit error-smoothing operator. Governing equations are written in terms of primitive variables and are recast into a general form. In the proposed method, all governing equation are relaxed locally, in contrast with commonly used segregated schemes. The effects of Rayleigh number, aspect ratio, and cavity inclination on temperature and velocity patterns are discussed. It is expected that more advanced parallel computer architectures can benefit from the error-smoothing operator described here.