A numerical study of a natural convection flow in a cavity

The solution to a benchmark problem of a differentially heated cavity flow with Ra = 3.4 x 10(5) and Pr=0.71 was solicited for presentation at a special session entitled 'Computational Predictability of Natural Convection Flows in Enclosures' which was held at the First MIT Conference on Computational Fluid and Solid Mechanics. The objective of this paper is to present the results obtained using the ADINA System. The 9-node quadrilateral element in ADINA was used with various meshes. Periodic solutions with a period of 3.42-3.43 were obtained. Compared with the average values of the solution variables and the periods, the calculated amplitudes of the periodic solutions were found to be more sensitive to the spatial and temporal discretizations used. The flow patterns, such as boundary layers, vortices, etc. were also studied using a fine 40 x 120 element mesh. Vortices and their evolutions were revealed inside the periodic flow field. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.