An annulus’s natural convection heat transfer has several technical uses. Common uses include electrical equipment, transformers, nuclear reactor core cooling, and so on. The annulus represents a common geometry seen in many types of heat transfer equipment, including heat exchangers. Components of nuclear fuel, etc. Researchers have given this issue a great deal of attention. All of this pushed us to conduct a CFD study on the simulation of a narrow annulus based on the reference paper “ Experimental and numerical analyses of natural convection flow in a partially heated vertical annulus.”

Simulation Process

The computational geometry considered here is the same as the experimental setup. The only slight difference is about adopting axisymmetric space. This simulation features a structured grid. The nature of natural convection requires several considerations. On top of it, the Boussinesq model with a proper thermal expansion coefficient value can facilitate the mechanism.

Post-processing

Based on the measured wall and liquid temperatures in the annular test section, the heat transfer coefficient and, hence, the Nusselt number have been evaluated. The wall temperature is 313.36K, while the bulk is 294.91 K. This heat transmission is caused by the use of aluminum as the conductor. The temperature contour perfectly portrays the transmission in annulus in terms of isotherms.