Thermal interactions among the confining walls of a turbulent recirculating flow

Numerical solutions for velocity and temperature fields in a cylindrical enclosure are obtained in order to determine how heat transfer at any one of the bounding walls is affected by the thermal boundary conditions at the other walls. The enclosure is a hollow cylinder, closed at both ends by circular disks. A recirculating flow is induced in the enclosure by a throughflow which enters via a central aperture in one of the disks and exits via an annular gap at the rim of the outer disk. The analysis is based on the k-epsilon turbulence model and the solutions are obtained by an elliptic finite difference method. Results are obtained for parametric values of the Reynolds number of the throughflow and of the length-to-radius ratio of the enclosure.