An Immersed Boundary Method for Simulation of Flow with Heat Transfer

Journal article, 2013

Natural convection occurs in many industrial applications such as free air cooling of electric components, the draft in a chimney and in ovens used for industrial drying processes. Many of these applications involve flow with complex boundaries, which require methods that can handle arbitrary ge- ometries. Such flows can be resolved with immersed boundary methods. In the present work, the hybrid immersed boundary method is extended with immersed boundary conditions for the temperature field. The extended im- mersed boundary method is used to couple the finite volume based Navier- Stokes solver with the finite element heat transfer solver for thin shell objects in IBOFlow. The coupling back to the thin shell is handled by a heat source in the equation for the shell temperature, calculated from Fourier’s law. The model is validated for three different cases taken from the literature: Natural convection in a square cavity with a hot and a cold vertical wall; natural convection around a hot circular cylinder submerged in a cold square cavity and free air cooling of an electrically heated plate. For all cases an excellent agreement with numerical and experimental data is obtained.