A numerical study on enhanced heat transfer in a lid driven cavity with and without fins

The objective of the present study is to examine the characteristics of a fluid flow with rectangular fins in a lid driven square cavity. Lid-driven flow in a cavity has wide applications in microelectronic cooling devices, heat exchangers, solar energy collectors, building heating and ventilation systems, removal of air and water contamination from cavities, food heating and cooling devices, metal casting, galvanizing, metal coating etc. In view of this a numerical study has been carried out using COMSOL on mixed convection in a lid-driven square cavity with a rectangular fin. Flow and temperature fields were determined for different boundary conditions for vertical walls by considering both the top and the bottom walls as adiabatic. The fin is located on one of the stationary walls of the cavity. The simulated results were validated with the available literature for the case of a square cavity without fin. In the present investigation two different cases have been studied based on the location of the fin(s).The range of parameters considered in this study are: Rayleigh number Ra=10(3)-10(5), dimensionless length (0.2 <L-f< 0.5) and dimensionless position (0.1<H-f<0.9) of the fin. The preliminary results showed that the Nusselt number is an increasing function of Rayleigh number and decreasing function of fin length. A notable finding is that the placing of fins on hot wall produced lower Nusselt number compared to the wall without fins because these fins blocked the flow of fluid in their vicinity.