Abstract
The Rayleigh number effects on turbulence structure of thermally-driven boundary layer generated by horizontal heated round plate are investigated by using a well-resolved large-eddy simulation. The simulation is performed with an open-source code, OpenFOAM, with the Cartesian coordinate grid with the large computational domain to prevent the decrease in grid resolution near the edge of the heated plate and the generation of large-scale circulations. The range of Rayleigh number based on the radius of the heated plate is 2.1×10^7 to 4.2×10^7, which yields transition of the boundary layer from the laminar to turbulence. The predicted statistics reveals that there exists similarity of turbulence statistics-profiles and structures whereas the mean thermal- and velocity-fields depends on the Rayleigh number.
