Natural convection heat transfer in cavities and cells

Despite an ever increasing amount of research on confined natural convection a problem inherent to all situations of this type that remains unsolved is that the core flow patterns cannot be predicted a priori in the boundary-layer regime. In order to present some new insights on this problem emphasis will be given to shallow cavities with differentially heated ends. This configuration has received considerable attention recently and has not been the subject of previous reviews. Other new aspects such as convection with heat flow imposed in more than one direction or due to the combined action of temperature and concentration gradients will also be summarized.