Pseudo-Steady-State Natural Convection Heat Transfer Inside a Vertical Cylinder

The SIMPLER numerical method was used to calculate the pseudo-steady-state natural convection heat transfer to a fluid inside a closed vertical cylinder for which the boundary temperature was spatially uniform and the temperatures throughout the entire system were increasing at the same rate. (Pseudo-steady state is comparable to the steady-state problem for a fluid with uniform heat generation and constant wall temperature.) Stream functions, temperature contours, axial velocities, and temperature profiles are presented. The range of calculation was 0.25 < H/D < 2, Ra < 10⁷, and Pr = 7. This range includes conduction to weak turbulence. A characteristic length defined as 6 × (volume)/(surface area) was used since it seemed to produce good regression results. The overall heat transfer for the convection-dominated range was found to be correlated by Nu = 0.519 Ra^0.255, where the temperature difference for both the Nusselt and Rayleigh numbers was the center temperature minus the wall temperature. Correlations using other temperature differences are also presented for estimating the volumetric mean and minimum temperatures.