Evaluation of Turbulent Models for Natural Convection of Compressible Air in a Tall Cavity

Abstract

Numerical simulation of turbulent natural convection of compressible air in a tall cavity is carried out. In order to evaluate the accuracy of turbulent models, various turbulent models are applied to solve the natural convection in a tall cavity that has different temperatures imposed on two opposing vertical walls. For the large-eddy simulation (LES) model, Smagorinsky subgrid scale (SGS) and dynamic Smagorinsky SGS are also applied to the same cases in order to investigate the differences in temperature and velocity caused by different turbulent models. It is found that the k–ϵ model has a high accuracy of predicting velocity distribution at various sampled lines by comparing with experimental data at Rayleigh number of 2.03 × 10¹⁰ and 3.37 × 10¹⁰, while the LES model has good performance in predicting temperature distributions.

Acknowledgments

Support for this work by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant number CBET- 1066917 is gratefully acknowledged.