Natural Convection of a Heat-Generating Fluid Within Closed Vertical Cylinders and Spheres

Steady natural convective flow fields were numerically and experimentally characterized for 0.7 Prandtl number fluids having constant, uniformly distributed, internal heat sources. The bounding isothermal walls containing the fluid were considered to be either a sphere or a cylinder of finite height. An instrumented cylinder containing radioactive tritium gas was used to demonstrate experimental and analytical agreement for local temperatures over a range of Grashof numbers. For the spherical geometry, a generalized correlation was obtained for the surface-averaged Nusselt number as a function of a modified Grashof number.