Numerical Simulation of Rayleigh Bénard Convection in an Enclosure: Effect of Vibrating Side Wall

Abstract

Transient convective heat transfer in an air-filled shallow enclosure with a vibrating side wall is investigated numerically. Rayleigh Bénard convection and oscillatory flows has been the subject of many investigations by using both experimental and theoretical methods. To our best knowledge, the influence of vibrating side wall on classical Rayleigh-Bénard convection has not been studied. In the present study, periodic vibration of the enclosure side wall is employed as a driving force of fluid motion. The sidewalls of enclosure are kept in adiabatic conditions while the bottom wall is isothermally heated and the top wall is kept at initial temperature. A control-volume method based, explicit time-marching Flux-Corrected Transport Algorithm is implemented to solve the fully compressible form of the Navier-Stokes and energy equations. The numerical results of a test case simulation with stationary sidewalls are compared with the existing literature for code validation. The oscillatory fluid motion significantly changes the transient behavior of the thermal transport in the enclosure compared to the pure Rayleigh-Bénard convection.