Development and validation of an incompressible Navier-Stokes solver including convective heat transfer

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a numerical method for the simulation of steady and unsteady incompressible laminar flows, including convective heat transfer. Design/methodology/approach – A node centered, finite volume discretization technique is applied on hybrid meshes. The developed solver, is based on the artificial compressibility approach. Findings – A sufficient number of representative test cases have been examined for the validation of this numerical solver. A wide range of the various dimensionless parameters were applied for different working fluids, in order to estimate the general applicability of our solver. The obtained results agree well with those published by other researchers. The strongly coupled solution of the governing equations showed superiority compared to the loosely coupled solution as inviscid effects increase. Practical implications – Convective heat transfer is dominant in a wide variety of practical engineering problems, such as cooling of electronic chips, design of heat exchangers and fire simulation and suspension in tunnels. Originality/value – A comparison between the strongly coupled solution and the loosely coupled solution of the Navier-Stokes and energy equations is presented. A robust upwind scheme based on Roe’s approximate Riemann solver is proposed.