Finite element analysis of unsteady natural convection

In this study, a new finite element method (the MSR-method) is proposed for unsteady three-dimensional thermal-fluid analyses. This method is a combination of a modified Galerkin method (MGM) and the SIMPLER formulation. In the MSR-method the velocity and pressure are computed using the SIMPLER procedure and the approximate velocity and the energy equation are solved using the MGM. In the MGM, the inertia term and the pressure term are considered explicitly, so only the symmetrical matrixes appear. Then an artificial viscosity is introduced through an error analysis approach to improve its accuracy and stability. In this paper, the natural convection problems in a three-dimensional cavity are simulated up to the Rayleigh number of 10(8), and converged solutions are obtained. Authors confirmed that our proposed method gives reasonable results for these problems comparing with other research works.