Study of Adiabatic Obstacles on Natural Convection in a Square Cavity Using Lattice Boltzmann Method

This study involves the effect of adiabatic obstacles on two-dimensional natural convection in a square enclosure using lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). The enclosure embodies square-shaped adiabatic obstacles with one, two, and four in number. The single obstacle in cavity is centrally placed, whereas for other two configurations, a different arrangement has been made such that the core fluid zone is not hampered. The four boundaries of the cavity considered here consist of two adiabatic horizontal walls and two differentially heated vertical walls. The current study covers the range of Rayleigh number (10³ ≤ Ra ≤ 10⁶) and a fixed Prandtl number of 0.71 for all cases. The effect of size of obstacle is studied in detail for single obstacle. It is found that the average heat transfer along the hot wall increases with the increase in size of obstacle until it reaches an optimum value and then with further increase in size, the heat transfer rate deteriorates. Study is carried out to delineate the comparison between the presences of obstacle in and out of the conduction dominant zone in the cavity. The number of obstacles (two and four) outside of this core zone shows that heat transfer decreases despite the obstacle being adiabatic in nature.