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Wall-sheared thermal convection: heat transfer enhancement and turbulence relaminarization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2023

Ao Xu Open the ORCID record for Ao Xu [Opens in a new window] ,
Ben-Rui Xu  and
Heng-Dong Xi Open the ORCID record for Heng-Dong Xi [Opens in a new window]
Ao Xu
Affiliation:
School of Aeronautics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, PR China Institute of Extreme Mechanics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, PR China
Ben-Rui Xu
Affiliation:
School of Aeronautics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, PR China
Heng-Dong Xi*
Affiliation:
School of Aeronautics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, PR China Institute of Extreme Mechanics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, PR China
*
†Email address for correspondence: hengdongxi@nwpu.edu.cn
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Abstract

We studied the flow organization and heat transfer properties in two-dimensional and three-dimensional Rayleigh–Bénard cells that are imposed with different types of wall shear. The external wall shear is added with the motivation of manipulating flow mode to control heat transfer efficiency. We imposed three types of wall shear that may facilitate the single-roll, the horizontally stacked double-roll, and the vertically stacked double-roll flow modes, respectively. Direct numerical simulations are performed for fixed Rayleigh number $Ra = 10^{8}$ and fixed Prandtl number $Pr = 5.3$, while the wall-shear Reynolds number ($Re_{w}$) is in the range $60 \leqslant Re_{w} \leqslant 6000$. Generally, we found enhanced heat transfer efficiency and global flow strength with the increase of $Re_{w}$. However, even with the same magnitude of global flow strength, the heat transfer efficiency varies significantly when the cells are under different types of wall shear. An interesting finding is that by increasing the wall-shear strength, the thermal turbulence is relaminarized, and more surprisingly, the heat transfer efficiency in the laminar state is higher than that in the turbulent state. We found that the enhanced heat transfer efficiency at the laminar regime is due to the formation of more stable and stronger convection channels. We propose that the origin of thermal turbulence laminarization is the reduced amount of thermal plumes. Because plumes are mainly responsible for turbulent kinetic energy production, when the detached plumes are swept away by the wall shear, the reduced number of plumes leads to weaker turbulent kinetic energy production. We also quantify the efficiency of facilitating heat transport via external shearing, and find that for larger $Re_{w}$, the enhanced heat transfer efficiency comes at a price of a larger expenditure of mechanical energy.

JFM classification

Convection: Plumes/thermals Turbulent Flows: Turbulent convection
Type
JFM Papers
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 960 , 10 April 2023 , A2
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Xu et al. Supplementary Movie 1

Temperature and flow fields under the wall shear

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Xu et al. Supplementary Movie 2

Turbulence relaminarization process

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