SPH 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≤ T≤ 10 K) and negative (-10≤ 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 T>0 and a vertically descending flow just below the source for 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 10-5 m 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.