Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Modeling of Natural Convection Around a Heated Horizontal Cylinder: A Comparison With Experiments

Abstract

An experimental and numerical smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) analysis was performed for the convective flow arising from a horizontal, thin cylindrical heat source enclosed in a glycerin-filled, slender enclosure at low Rayleigh numbers (1.18 ≤ Ra ≤ 242). Both the experiments and the SPH calculations were performed for positive (0.1 ≤ Δ T ≤ 10 K) and negative (-10 ≤ Δ T ≤ -0.1 K) temperature differences between the source and the surrounding fluid. In all cases a pair of steady, counter-rotating vortices is formed, accompanied by a plume of vertically ascending flow just above the source for ΔT > 0 and a vertically descending flow just below the source for Δ T<0. The maximum flow velocities always occur within the ascending/descending plumes. The SPH predictions are found to match the experimental observations acceptably well with root-mean-square errors in the velocity profiles of the order of ~ 10-5m s-1. The fact that the SPH method is able to reveal the detailed features of the flow phenomenon demonstrates the correctness of the approach.