Numerical investigation of natural convection heat transfer from a stack of horizontal cylinders

Natural convection heat transfer from horizontal solid cylinders has been studied numerically by varying the Rayleigh number in the range of (10⁴≤Ra≤10⁸) and (10¹⁰≤Ra≤10¹³) for both laminar and turbulent flows, respectively. The computations were carried out for three different geometries of three, six, and ten cylinders in a stack arranged in a triangular manner having same characteristic length scale. The present numerical investigation on natural convention is able to capture a very interesting flow pattern and temperature field over the stack of horizontal cylinders which has never been reported in the literature so far. Visualization of plume structure over the horizontal cylinders has also been obtained pictorially in the present work. From the numerical results, it has been observed that the total heat transfer is marginally higher for three-cylinder stack in the laminar range. In contrast, for turbulent flow, starting from Ra=10¹⁰, heat transfer for six-cylinder case is higher but when Ra exceeds 5×10¹¹, heat transfer for ten cylinders stack is marginally higher. The average surface Nusselt number is higher for the stack of three cylinders compared to six- and ten-cylinder cases for all range of Ra in both laminar and turbulent regimes. A correlation for the average Nusselt number has also been developed as a function of Rayleigh number which may be useful for researchers and industrial purposes.