Abstract
This paper is a continuation of a recent development on the Hermite-based divergence-free element method and deals with a non-isothermal fluid flow driven by the buoyancy force in a square cavity with temperature difference across the two sides. Two Hermite functions are considered for numerical computations in this paper. One is a cubic function and the other is a quartic function. The degrees-of-freedom of the cubic Hermite function are stream function and its first and second derivatives for the velocity field, and temperature and its first derivatives for the temperature field. The degrees-of-freedom of the quartic Hermite function include two second derivatives and one cross derivative of the stream function in addition to the degrees-of-freedom of the cubic stream function. This paper presents a brief review on the Hermite based divergence-free basis functions and its finite element formulations for the buoyancy driven flow. The present algorithm does not employ any upwinding or a stabilization term. However, numerical values and contour graphs for major flow variables showed good agreements with those by De Vahl Davis[6].