Natural convection in equilateral triangular enclosure for three situations with heating element applied at different positions on the inclined side wall

Abstract EN

Laminar natural convection heat transfer and fluid flow due to heating element inserted at different positions over the inclined side wall of equilateral triangle enclosure has been analyzed numerically in this study.

The enclosure has filled with air as a working fluid with Pr=0.71.

The walls of the enclosure are insulated except an element on one side where the heat flux are applied.

The value of heat flux ( q" ) are 10, 30, 70 and 100 Watt with corresponding Rayleigh number of 105, 106, 107, 108 respectively.

The length of the heating element was taken as 10% of the triangular enclosure side wall length where the length of the wall equals to 10 cm.

The governing mass, momentum and energy equations are applied to the enclosure and solved by finite element using commercial code (ANSYS 5.4) based on TDMA method.

Three different situations (normal, side and inverse) of the triangular enclosure with different positions of heating element are examined in this study to obtain the maximum stream function.

The results show that the maximum value of stream function and high rate of heat transfer occur for normal situation of the enclosure and when the heating element is applied at position2 (Po.2 is a distance over the inclined side wall which takes a position limited between 0.2L to 0.3L from the edge of the triangle enclosure).