The Shape of an Enclosure With Uniform-Flux, Isothermal, Nonhorizontal Walls
This paper presents a computational procedure and results of a numerical quest for the shape of a special kind of differentially heated air-filled enclosure. The enclosure shape is such that the natural-convection flow in the enclosure gives rise to a uniform horizontal-heat-flux distribution at the isothermal hot and cold walls. By using an evolution algorithm, the isothermal walls are “consumed” according to the heat-flux distribution until a steady-state shape is reached. For both adiabatic and perfectly conducting horizontal walls, results of calculations are presented for Rayleigh numbers up to 8 × 104. The resulting flow and temperature distributions in the steady-state enclosures are presented and discussed.