Natural convection between parallel plates with conjugate conductive effects

This article deals with the conjugate conductive and convective heat transfer in a vertical channel with finite thickness conductive parallel plates. The investigation is carried out numerically by solving the full elliptic Navier-stokes and energy equations with the finite volume method in a composite I-shaped domain. The results are reported as functions of the main geometrical (B/b and L/b) and thermal (K and Ra*) parameters, for a Prandtl number of 0.71 (i.e., air). The results show that the thinner the plate the more uniform the heat flux distribution along the plate. As the thickness of the plate increases, the heat flux distribution is less uniform and at the inlet corner the temperatures present much higher values titan at the infinitely thin plate. Lower plate thermal conductivity implies a more uniform heat flux distribution and lower temperature increments than the infinitely thin plate. The dependence of the heat flux and temperature distributions along the solid-fluid interface is stronger than the lower the Ra* value.