Author(s)

A. Andreozzi, N. Bianco, O. Manca & V. Naso

Abstract

In this study a numerical investigation of mixed convection in air due to the interaction between a buoyancy flow and a moving plate induced flow in a vertical channel is carried out. The moving plate has a constant velocity and moves along the buoyancy force direction whereas the principal walls of the channel are heated with uniform heat flux. The effects of the channel spacing, heat flux and moving plate velocity are investigated and results in terms of the channel wall and moving plate temperatures are given. Results show that the moving plate effects are more significant when the channel gap b is lower, for lower moving plate velocity values. For higher moving plate velocity values these effects are more considerable for all b values and for lower heat flux values. Keywords: mixed convection, numerical analysis, vertical channel, moving plate. 1 Introduction Mixed convection due to moving surfaces is very important in wide variety of materials processing systems, such as welding, extrusion of plastics and other polymeric materials and chemical vapor deposition [1, 2]. The greater part of research on mixed convection with continuously moving vertical surfaces in a quiescent fluid has been developed for singlemoving plate, as recently shown in [1-4]. A first study on continuously moving sheet was carried out in [5]. A similarity transformation was used to obtain a solution of the boundary layer on a continuously moving vertical surface into a quiescent ambient fluid. The buoyancy force can affect significantly the fluid flow along a vertical moving surface and the first studies on this topic were reported in [6, 7]. These investigations confirmed that flow field and heat transfer from the surface significantly depended on ther-

Keywords

mixed convection, numerical analysis, vertical channel, moving plate.