Heatline visualization for thermal transport in complex solid domains with discrete heat sources at the bottom wall

Abstract

The current work attempts to numerically investigate the thermal transport for two-dimensional solid complex geometries with two discrete heat sources at the bottom wall. The computational grid has been developed in GAMBIT and then linked to the in-house code which is based on collocated grid based Finite Volume Method (FVM). In this study five different domains viz. square, trapezoidal, skewed, S-curve and H-curve have been considered and the thermal conductivity has been varied from 0.25 to 10 W/m K. A concept of Bejan's heatline visualization has been considered for the analysis of thermal transport. The heatlines along with isotherms are observed to provide a better insight for the understanding of thermal transport in considered complex geometries. With the domain thermal conductivity of 0.25 W/m K the maximum hot spot temperature is noted to be 443 K (square) and minimum of 436 K (S-curve). It is observed that with the increase in thermal conductivity from 0.25 to 10 W/m K, the maximum temperature in the domain decreased by 23.71 % for skewed and 20.77 % for S-curve geometries.