Implementation and Validation of OpenFOAM for Thermal Convection of Airflow

Abstract

The open source code software (OpenFOAM) was applied to simulate the thermal convection of airflow. The fresh inlet airflow past a circular cylindrical heater through the variable cross-section duct by the centrifugal fan had been employed to study the thermal convection phenomenon. The widely used k-ε turbulence model was implemented to simulate the thermal convection of airflow. The pressure-velocity coupling was used an effective steady state algorithm, SIMPLE algorithm, for solving a zero pressure gradient problem. The upwind differencing (UD), linear upwind differencing (LUD), QUICK, and TVD scheme were the important schemes which were selected to solve convection-diffusion problems of the airflow past a circular cylindrical heater. The thermal convection experiment was setup using the P3210 heat transfer bench of Cussons technology. The velocities of airflow had been adjusted from 5 to 20 m/s by opening a cap at the exhaust fan duct. The heater temperatures were controlled at 100, 150 and 200°C. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) results were compared with the experimental data. The comparison between CFD models and physical experiments were in good agreement. The average error of the k-ε turbulence model by solving with the SIMPLE algorithm, UD scheme for velocity, and QUICK scheme for temperature results was less than 4.25% when compared with the experimental data.