Hi

I am just woundering how good fluent 4.5 & 5.0 itself is, in modeling free convection, when you effectively have no inflow/outflow bounday condition except for wall BCs. Is fluent 4.5 & 5.0 capable of modelling such flow?.

Regards

Oliver

Dear Oliver

As far as my experience is concerned, you can model free convection by both Fluent 4.5 and Fluent 5.0.

For free convection with low Rayleigh number laminar flow(say, Ra < 1.e6), both of 4.5 & 5.x have shown good convergence. For high Rayleigh number laminar flow and turbulent flow(say, Ra > 1.e8), Fluent 4.5 has shown very good convergence than Fluent 5.x. And if you have convergence problem for high Rayleigh number flow, you might have good convergence if you use time-marching method.

The above Rayleigh number is based on free convection in the square cavity.

Sincerely, Jinwook

thanks

oliver