Buoyancy-driven flow and heat transfer in open-ended enclosures: elimination of the extended boundaries

The present study is focused on obtaining an accurate representation of effective boundary conditions at the open side of two- and three-dimensional open-ended structures. Implementation of this representation reduces the more complicated open-ended boundary conditions to a closed-ended domain and results in substantial savings in CPU and memory usage. The numerical procedure used in this work is based on the Galerkin weighted residual method of finite-element formulation. Comparisons between the present investigation using the correlations for the proposed closed-ended model and the results for the extended computational domain attest to the successful implementation of the proposed model. The results presented in this work constitute an innovative way to describe correctly the boundary conditions at the open side of an open-ended boundary. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.