Numerical study of effects of inclination on buoyancy-induced flow oscillation in a lid-driven arc-shaped cavity

Numerical predictions of the inclination effects on the buoyancy-induced oscillatory flow in a lid-driven arc-shaped cavity are presented in this report. Governing equations in terms of the stream function - vorticity formulation expressing the laws of conservation in mass, momentum, and energy are solved by the finite-volume method in curvilinear coordinates. Computations have been performed for various combinations of physical parameters. The inclination angle of the cavity (θ) is varied from 0° to 15°, the Reynolds number (Re) is assigned to be 100, 200, and 500, and the Grashof number (Gr) ranges from 3 × 10⁵ to 1 × 10⁷, while the Prandtl number is fixed at 0.71 for air. In these above ranges of the parameters, two kinds of oscillatory flow pattern have been observed, namely, the traversing-periodic and the half-periodic patterns. Attention has been focused on the effects of the inclination effects on the occurrence of these two different oscillatory flow patterns. Meanwhile, periodic variation in the mixed-convection heat transfer accompanying the oscillatory flow field has also been studied, and the results for the local and the overall Nusselt numbers are presented.