Numerical simulation of natural convection in circular enclosures with inner polygonal cylinders, with confirmation by experimental results

Numerical computations are performed for the natural convection in circular enclosures with inner polygonal cylinders. The polygon surface and the outer envelope are at constant but different temperatures. A body-fitted coordinate system is used. The coordinate system is generated via simple algebraic equations. The transformed governing equations are discretized on a control volume basis with power-law finite difference scheme. The SIMPLE-like algorithm is used to deal with the linkage between pressure and velocities. The numerical results are compared with the experimental data available in the literature, and the agreement between the numerical and experimental results are very good.