Abstract

CERVANTES DE GORTARI, J.G. et al. Heatlines in Free Convection within Closed Cavities: Three Study Cases. Ing. invest. y tecnol. [online]. 2010, vol.11, n.4, pp.369-378. ISSN 2594-0732.

The heatline visualization technique is presented for three cases of free convection in cavities. The advantages of the technique over the commonly used isotherms in fluid mechanics are shown and discussed. The three cases under study have been arbitrarily chosen be cause each one of them can be found experimentally and numerically in the open literature, providing results for flow and temperature fields. It was found that isotherms are not an effective visualization tool in fluid motion phenomena while heatlines characterize these flows regardless of the value of Rayleigh number.

Keywords : Visualization; heat transfer; isotherms; cavity convection; heatlines.