Mixed convection of heat generating nanofluid in a lid-driven cavity with uniform and non-uniform heating of bottom wall

Steady state two-dimensional mixed convection in a lid-driven square cavity filled with Cu-water nanofluid is investigated numerically in the presence of internal heat generation. In the present investigation, bottom wall is uniformly and non-uniformly heated while two vertical walls are fixed and they are thermally insulated. The top wall is moving from left to right at a constant speed. The governing equations are normalized and solved numerically with boundary conditions by finite volume approach using third order accurate upwinding scheme (deferred QUICK). Effects of the pertinent physical parameters are investigated in terms of the flow and temperature fields, as well as Nusselt number distributions. The presented results show that the solid volume fraction plays a significant role on the flow and thermal fields and the Nusselt number distributions for different flow configurations. It is found that Richardson number strongly affect the fluid flow and heat transfer in the cavity. For Ri < 1, the forced convection becomes dominant in the entire cavity, the natural convection relatively weak. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.