Natural convection in a trapezoidal cavity filled with Cu-water nano fluid and heated from its bottom wall

Abstract EN

Natural convection in a trapezoidal enclosure heated from below and filled with Cu-water nanofluid has investigated numerically.

The lower wall is maintained at constant high temperature, the side walls are maintained at constant low temperature, and the upper wall is thermally insulated.

Flow within the enclosure is steady, two-dimensional, and laminar.

The pure fluid molecules (water) and the basic nanoparticles (Cu) are in thermal equilibrium, and there is no sliding between them.

A finite volume method with collocated grid is used to discretize mass, momentum and energy equations.

Grid generation method is employed to generate the coordinate system.

SIMPLE algorithm is used to link the velocity and pressure fields.

The range of Rayleigh number is ) , the tilt angles of the side walls are (θ = 0°, 30°, and 45°) and the range of solid volume fraction is (0 ≤ φ ≤ 0.2).The results show that the highest average Nusselt number occurs at (θ = 0°) for both pure fluid and nanofluid, and the average Nusselt number at (θ = 30°) is almost equal to the average Nusselt number at (θ = 45°) for both pure fluid and nanofluid.