Effect of Radiation on Mixed Convection Inside a Lid-Driven Square Cavity With Various Optical Thicknesses and Richardson Numbers

This work studies numerically the effect of the radiative heat transfer on the flow and thermal behaviors of the mixed convection in a lid-driven square cavity in the presence of radiatively emitting, absorbing, and isotropically scattering gray medium. The Boussinesq approximation has been used in modeling the governing equations, and the SIMPLE (semi-implicit method for pressure-linked equations) algorithm is used in coupling the velocity and pressure fields. The radiative transfer equation and the governing equations have been solved respectively by the discrete ordinates method and the finite-volume method in order to obtain the temperature, velocity, and heat flux distributions in the participating medium. The present numerical simulations are validated by comparison with several earlier studies. Then, the temperature and velocity distributions and Nusselt numbers have been analyzed in a broad range of optical thicknesses from 0 to 100 and Richardson numbers from 0.01 to 100. The results show that the radiation has a significant role on the flow and thermal behaviors in the lid-driven square cavity. As an example, we can refer to a sweep behavior that is detected in the velocity distributions of the lid-driven cavity.