In this paper, the Fourier expansion-based differential quadrature (FDQ) an
d the polynomial-based differential quadrature (PDQ) methods are applied to
simulate the natural convection in a concentric annulus with a horizontal
axis. The comparison and grid independence of PDQ and FDQ results are studi
ed in detail. It was found that both PDQ and FDQ can obtain accurate numeri
cal solutions using just a few grid points and requiring very small computa
tional resources. It was demonstrated in the paper that the FDQ method can
be applied to a periodic problem or a non-periodic problem. When FDQ is app
lied to a non-periodic problem (half of annulus), it can achieve the same o
rder of accuracy as the PDQ method. And when FDQ is applied to the periodic
problem (whole annulus), it is very efficient for low Rayleigh numbers. Ho
wever, its efficiency is greatly reduced for the high Rayleigh numbers. The
benchmark solution for Ra = 10(2), 10(3), 3 x 10(3), 6 x 10(3), 10(4), 5 x
10(4) are also presented in the paper. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Son
s, Ltd.