Numerical study of laminar mixed convection under steady and unsteady flow conditions

The present work consists of a numerical study of laminar mixed convection in a square cavity, a cavity has been chosen whose left vertical wall is mobile and subjected to a cold temperature, while the right wall is considered fixed and hot. The horizontal walls are adiabatic. where configuration of the lid-driven enclosure is encountered in many realistic engineering and industrial applications, such as, contains cooling of electronic devices, materials processing, flow and heat transfer in solar ponds, thermal-hydraulics of nuclear reactors and metal coating. The governing equations are the continuity equation, the Navier-Stocks equations, and the energy equation. These equations are discretized by the finite volume method. The objective of this work is to study the effect of the Reynolds and Grashof numbers on the structure of the flow. We were able to determine the correlation between the number Gr and Re to determine the transition boundaries from one convection regime to another regime (laminar, then transient).