Natural Convection Heat Transfer from a Plane Wall to Thermally Stratified Environment

Abstract

The effect of linear thermal stratification in stable stationary ambient fluid on free convective flow of a viscous incompressible fluid along a plane wall is numerically investigated in the present work. The governing equations of continuity, momentum and energy are solved numerically using finite difference method with Alternating Direct implicit Scheme. The velocity, temperature distributions and the Nusselt number are discussed numerically for various values of physical parameters and presented through graphs. ANSYS program also used to solve the problem. The results show that the effect of stratification parameter is marginalized with the increase in Prandtl number, and the increase in Grashof number does not practically vary the effect of stratification parameter.