Transient turbulent simulation of natural convection flows induced by a room heater.

A warming room air in a cold weather is an urgent need for people to keep performing normal activities in a comfortable environment. In the current study, a heater attached to one of the room's walls induces the natural convection flow. The flow is simulated by a turbulent unsteady compressible Navier-Stokes solver at a Rayleigh number of 3.06 × 10 11 . Two cases are investigated and their boundary conditions are identical except the right side where is adiabatic or isothermal. Although the adiabatic case had a significant importance in the domestic heating, it wasn't investigated in the literature. The transient results show that the hotter streams occupy the top zone where the velocity is relatively high and then move downward. As a whole, the average temperature of the adiabatic case is higher than that of the isothermal case, but the isothermal case has a higher temperature gradient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]