Numerical and experimental study of heat transfer in a tall vertical closed cavity

In this work the numerical and experimental results of heat transfer in a vertical tall closed cavity are presented. The cavity has an aspect ratio of 20, one of the vertical walls receive a constant and uniform heat flux, while the opposite wall is kept at a constant temperature. The remaining walls are assumed adiabatic. The cavity is full of air. The computational fluid dynamics software Fluent 6.3 was used for the simulation and an experimental prototype was built to obtain the heat transfer coefficients. The air temperature and the fluid velocity values are higher when emissivity (ε) is 0.03 (almost pure natural convection). The experimental total heat transfer coefficient increases between 119.9 and 159.9 % when the emissivity of the walls changes from 0.03 to 0.95. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.