• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.38 no.12
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• pp.975-982
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• 2014

This study evaluates the effect of a heated circular cylinder's size on three-dimensional natural convection in a cubical enclosure. The Rayleigh number was varied between $10^3$ and $10^5$, and the Prandtl number was maintained at 0.7. In this study, the radius of the circular cylinder was changed by 0.1 L within a range of 0.1-0.4 L. The thermal and fluid flow characteristics were regarded to be independent of time in the range of the Rayleigh number and cylinder radius considered in this study. The surface-averaged Nusselt numbers of the cylinder and the enclosure were found to increase with the increase in the radius of the cylinder. The effect of the cylinder's size on natural convection in the enclosure was analyzed across the thermal and flow fields, and the distributions of the Nusselt numbers.