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In this work, natural convection heat transfer from two horizontally attached cylinders in air has been studied numerically over the range of Rayleigh number 10 ⩽ Ra ⩽ 10 5 . A new model proposed by Bejan et al. (1995) is applied here, and it has been proved to be a more accurate and effective method for the numerical simulation of the natural convection in free space than other models used previously. Furthermore, the representative results for streamlines, isothermal contours, local Nusselt number and local drag coefficients have been presented with different Rayleigh numbers. It can be observed that there form two recirculation vortexes in the wake region when the two plumes begin to merge, and their sizes grow with the increasing Rayleigh number due to the downstream movement of the front stagnation point and the upstream movement of the separation point. Owing to the interactions of their plumes, the location of the maximum value of local Nusselt number moves downstream along the cylinder surface, i.e., it displaces to 133–150° depending on the Rayleigh number whereas it always occurs at the front stagnation point corresponding to 90° for a single cylinder. However, because the thinnest boundary layer in this work still hardly penetrates the small clearance between them and then influences their heat transfer, their interactions are independent of the Rayleigh number. Finally, a new correlating equation of the average Nusselt number with the Rayleigh number for the present configuration, has been proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Well-resolved direct numerical simulation (DNS) is applied to investigate strongly heated air flow in a vertical pipe ( L = 30 D ) at inlet Reynolds numbers of Re 0 = 4240 and 6020. The DNS is based on the experimental cases of Shehata and McEligot (1995) and shows excellent agreement with heat-transfer and flow statistical results. Flow relaminarization is observed in the strongly heated cases. We apply a new semi-local wall coordinate to replace the conventional one. With the semi-local wall coordinates, which considers the local property variation, both the velocity and temperature fields show the process of relaminarization. This relaminarization is also indicated by the significant decrease of turbulence intensity and Reynolds shear stress. In the quasi-laminar flow, the viscous sublayer becomes thicker. Turbulence in this layer shows a growing anisotropic character. And turbulence in the pipe center becomes approximately isotropic. This two-layer character is clearly displayed by flow visualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]