Incompressible smoothed particle hydrodynamics modeling of thermal convection

Abstract

An incompressible smoothed particle hydrodynamics (ISPH) method based on the incremental pressure projection method is developed in this study. The Rayleigh-Bénard convection in a square enclosure is used as a validation case and the results obtained by the proposed ISPH model are compared to the benchmark solutions. The comparison shows that the established ISPH method has a good performance in terms of accuracy. Subsequently, the proposed ISPH method is employed to simulate natural convection from a heated cylinder in a square enclosure. It shows that the predictions obtained by the ISPH method are in good agreements with the results obtained by previous studies using alternative numerical methods. A rotating and heated cylinder is also considered to study the effect of the rotation on the heat transfer process in the enclosure space. The numerical results show that for a square enclosure at , the addition of kinetic energy in the form of rotation does not enhance the heat transfer process. The method is also applied to simulate forced convection from a circular cylinder in an unbounded uniform flow. In terms of results, it turns out that the proposed ISPH model is capable to simulate heat transfer problems with the complex and moving boundaries.