THERMAL SOURCE EFFECT ON THE NATURAL CONVECTION OF A NANOFLUID WITHIN A TRIANGULAR CAVITY

Abstract

Natural convection is numerically studied in a triangular cavity whose inclined walls that is isothermal at temperature TC, while its base is thermally insulated. The cavity contains a hot isothermal cylindrical heat source TH of diameter D. In this study, we used the nanofluid (water + TiO2). The nanoparticle volume fraction is varied within the range 0.01 ≤ ϕ ≤ 0.05, and the Rayleigh number is set between 103 and 106 . The main objective of this study is to explore the impact of nanoparticle concentration, Rayleigh number (Ra), and heat source position (h) on the enhancement of convective thermal transfer. The simulation results show that thermal exchange improves with increasing Ra, heat source diameter, and nanoparticle volume fraction (ϕ).

Keywords

• natural convection
• triangular cavity
• thermal exchange
• nanofluids
• tio2
• modelling