NATURAL-CONVECTION IN A CAVITY WITH A NONUNIFORMLY HEATED VERTICAL WALL - EXPERIMENTAL-STUDY

This paper presents the results of an experimental study on the natural convection in a cavity, along a vertical plate submitted to discontinuous heat flux distributions. Four different configurations of heating, corresponding to housing conditions or to integrated circuits, were used on the vertical plate : a relatively hot lower zone, a hot upper zone, a hot central zone and a cold central zone The results obtained show that the temperature difference used to modelize the mean heat transfer is the one which takes into account the equilibrium temperature in the core of the cavity. A single formula is proposed to calculate the heat transfer in the four configurations.