NATURAL CONVECTIVE HEAT-TRANSFER RATES IN RECTANGULAR ENCLOSURES

An experimental study of buoyancy-driven convection in rectangular enc losures has been made in order to obtain convection coefficients and d ata correlations which are more accurate for real building situation. Three different flow regimes viz. stably-stratified flow, buoyancy-dri ven vertical flow and horizontal flow were investigated. The Nusselt n umber variation with respect to the Rayleigh number has been plotted a nd compared with existing correlations, In general, the measured data were lower than the data obtained from the existing correlations which are mainly derived from data obtained from experiments involving isol ated surfaces. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science S.A.