Study of the turbulent Prandtl number influence on the mixed convection heat transfer

Abstract

The present study is a first insight into the world of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)in power engineering. That is, numerical methods and algorithms are used to solve and analyze problems that involve heat and fluid flows. The physical phenomena of turbulent mixed convection is studied with the aid of the program OpenFOAM using Large Eddy Simulation (LES) as a turbulent model. This model uses a parameter called turbulent Prandtl number in order to take account of the thermal effects of turbulence. However, there is not much agreement on which value should have this parameter. As a result, the solutions (temperature and velocity profiles) can vary depending on the turbulent Prandtl number used and therefore it is important to fix this parameter in the right way. So this project is going to analyze the influence of the turbulent Prandtl number in a particular experiment and try to conclude if this approach can be further used. At the same time, the computational domain will be optimized so that a better set of conditions are found to describe numerically the problem.

Outgoing