NATURAL-CONVECTION BETWEEN 2 COMPARTMENTS OF A STAIRWELL - NUMERICAL PREDICTION AND COMPARISON WITH EXPERIMENT

This work describes the results of a numerical study of buoyancy-drive n flow in a stairwell model. Direct comparisons with the experimental data have been presented. The model is based on the conservation equat ions of mass, momentum, and energy and the transport equations of turb ulence energy and its rate of dissipation. Two different wall thermal boundary conditions, namely, temperature and heat flux, are used and t he results are compared. In the case of the heat flux boundary conditi on, only the convective component of the heat flux at each wall has be en used, by first calculating the radiative component and then separat ing it from the total heat flux. The numerical model predicts the over all features of the flow satisfactorily, and the details of the veloci ty and temperature field with reasonable accuracy.