Thermal vortices in a wake past a heated plate aligned with a vertical downward air flow

The appearance of a vortex street past a heated flow aligned with a downward flow was analyzed using Flow Vision software. The vortices were made up of fluids with a higher temperature than that in the undisturbed flow. The fields of the velocity, static pressure, and temperature were obtained by integrating the Navier-Stokes and energy equations in the Boussinesq approximation on a staggered Cartesian grid. An explicit finite-volume projection-type method was also used. The traditional boundary conditions were imposed on the boundaries of a rectangular computational domain and on the plane surface. Different flow patterns were made visible in the flow downstream from the plate and their stability regions in the plane were also observed. Results show that for low Richardson numbers, vortex formation in the wake past a fluid region subject to a volume buoyancy, takes place similarly to vortex shedding from a rigid body.