Natural convection in a partially heated cylinder: A numerical study

Abstract

This work presents a numerical study on a natural convective flow in a cylindrical container heated from below, cooled from above, and partially heated from the lateral wall. Mass, momentum and energy equations were solved with a developed hybrid Fourier-finite volume code and validated with the commercial software COMSOL Multiphysics for steady-state solutions. The primary solutions correspond to steady-states C m with azimuthal wavenumbers m. The results show mode competition between different states leading to many flow solutions including steady axisymmetric, steady non-axisymmetric, time-dependent pulsating wave solutions, and other flow states with a variety of spatiotemporal symmetries.