Numerical study on conjugate conduction-convection in a cubic enclosure submitted to time-periodic sidewall temperature

The laminar conjugate conduction-natural convection heat transfer in a cubic enclosure of finite thickness conductive walls and central cavity filled with fluid is comprehensively studied by using recently developed high accuracy temporal-spatial multidomain pseudospectral method. The enclosure is assumed to have one sidewall submitted to time-periodic pulsating temperature and the opposing sidewall constant temperature, and the top, bottom and two lateral sidewalls are adiabatic. The present study is devoted to explore the fluid mechanics and heat transfer mechanisms of the time-periodic conjugate conduction-natural convection in the enclosure, with particular highlights on the heat transfer resonance and back heat transfer phenomena, the perturbation propagation patterns and the three-dimensional characteristics. The computations are performed for wide ranges of controlling parameters of engineering significance, i.e., the dimensionless wall thickness 0 ≤ s ≤ 0.10, the solid-fluid thermal conductivity ratio 10 ≤ k ≤ 50 and diffusivity ratio 0.001 ≤ a ≤ 0.1, and the sidewall temperature pulsating period 1 ≤ P ≤ 10³. Numerical results reveal that the time-periodic fluid flow and conjugate heat transfer performances of the enclosure system are greatly affected by the conductive walls and complexly dependent on the controlling parameters. The thickness and thermophysical properties of the conductive walls, together with the pulsating period of the sidewall temperature, govern the sidewall temperature disturbance propagation patterns (amplitude, phase position and speed) within the enclosure. The heat transfer resonance only appears in cases of large diffusivity ratio, but the variation of period-averaged heat transfer rate with respect to the pulsating period is quite different from that of the zero wall thickness enclosure. The back heat transfer exists in region close to the corners formed by either the top or bottom walls and the enclosure hot sidewall, and the former is more remarkable in both scale and duration and is gradually disappearing as the pulsating period increases.