Numerical study of the impact of baffle on flow and heat transfer inside a skewed enclosure

Abstract

The effectiveness of natural convection heat transfer in a skewed enclosure is investigated in this study with respect to variations of baffle lengths and the skew angles.The non-dimensional governing equations aresolved using finite element techniques based on Galerkin weighted residuals. The effect of the baffle length and skew angles ( ) on fluid flow and heat transfer for various Rayleigh numbers ( ) areexplored in this study. The analyses are carried outfor different values of Rayleigh number (Ra), baffle lengths (L) for fixed baffle thickness and baffle position while Prandtl number is maintained constant at 1.41. In addition, various features such as streamlines, isotherms, velocity profiles, temperature profiles, local Nusselt number, baffle effectiveness, and heat transfer rate in terms of the average Nusselt number ( ) and average fluid temperature was shown for the relevant parameters. Several comparisons have been made between the results of this study and previously published studies to assess the reliability and consistency of the data. Streamlines, isotherms, local and average Nusselt numbers, mean fluid temperature, andbaffle effectiveness were used to illustrate the results of simulations. The findings of the study showed that heat transfer rate improves with the increase of Rayleigh number.Furthermore, the results showed that the heat transmission rate rises when the skew angle is progressively raised to . But after that, when the angles arefurther raised up to , the heat transmission rate reduces. The findings of this study are highly consistent with those of previous research.