NATURAL-CONVECTION IN AN ENCLOSURE WITH A VERTICAL BAFFLE

A numerical study is made of natural convection in an enclosure with a vertical, finitely conducting baffle. The end-wall is assumed to be either perfectly conducting or adiabatic. Predicted flow and isotherm patterns indicate the existence of strong thermal stratification in the baffle/cold wall region and are in qualitative agreement with reported experimental results. The baffle strongly influences the hot-wall Nusselt number distribution, but has a weaker effect on the cold-wall Nusselt number distribution. The predicted Nusselt numbers show satisfactory agreement with the high Rayleigh number based experimental correlation of Lin and Bejan in a partially divided enclosure of aspect ratio 0.3.