Abstract

External modulation on thermal convection has been studied extensively to achieve the control of flow structures and heat-transfer efficiency. In this paper, we carry out direct numerical simulations on Rayleigh–Bénard convection accounting for both the modulation of wall shear and roughness over the Rayleigh number range $1.0 \times 10^6 \le Ra \le 1.0 \times 10^8$ , the wall shear Reynolds number range $0 \le Re_w \le 5000$ , the aspect-ratio range $2 \le \varGamma \le 4{\rm \pi}$ , and the dimensionless roughness height range $0 \le h \le 0.2$ at fixed Prandtl number $Pr = 1$ . Under the combined actions of wall shear and roughness, with increasing $Re_w$ , the heat flux is initially enhanced in the buoyancy-dominant regime, then has an abrupt transition near the critical shear Reynolds number $Re_{w,cr}$ , and finally enters the purely diffusion regime dominated by shear. Based on the crossover of the kinetic energy production between the buoyancy-dominant and shear-dominant regimes, a physical model is proposed to predict the transitional scaling behaviour between $Re_{w,cr}$ and $Ra$ , i.e. $Re_{w,cr} \sim Ra^{9/14}$ , which agrees well with our numerical results. The reason for the observed heat-transport enhancement in the buoyancy-dominant regime is further explained by the fact that the moving rough plates introduce an external shear to strengthen the large-scale circulation (LSC) in the vertical direction and serve as a conveyor belt to increase the chances of the interaction between the LSC and secondary flows within cavities, which triggers more thermal plumes, efficiently transports the trapped hot (cold) fluids outside cavities.

The cryostat in the China Fusion Engineering Testing Reactor (CFETR) provides vacuum and low temperature operating conditions for the superconducting magnet system. A high pressure in the cryostat can increase the Rayleigh number (Ra) and cause the natural convection within the continuous hypothesis. A three-dimensional model, using incompressible ideal gas model and realizable k-ε model, is built to simulate the natural convection between the superconducting magnet system and the thermal shield within the temperature range of 4.5-80 K. The distributions of velocity field and heat flux on different surfaces of superconducting magnet system are obtained under different Rayleigh number conditions. The results show that the areas with large natural convection velocity mainly locate near the Central Solenoid (CS) coils and at the bottom of vacuum chamber. When the Rayleigh number ranges from 104 to 1010, the maximum velocity of helium gas decreases, while the heat flux on walls of superconducting magnets increases rapidly, and the heat flux on walls of PF-1, CS and TF coils is more affected by pressure, which needs to be considered in designing the safety system.