Natural convection with non-Newtonian shear-thinning power law fluids in inclined two dimensional rectangular cavities

Steady two-dimensional natural convection in rectangular cavities has been investigated numerically. The conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy under the assumption of a Newtonian Boussinesq fluid have been solved using the finite volume technique embedded in the Fluent code for a Newtonian (water) and three non Newtonian carbopol fluids. The highly accurate Quick differential scheme was used for discretization. The computations were performed for one Rayleigh number, based on cavity height, of 10⁵ and a Prandtl number of 10 and 700, 6,000 and 1.2×10⁴ for the Newtonian and the three non-Newtonian fluids respectively. In all of the numerical experiments, the channel is heated from below and cooled from the top with insulated side-walls and the inclination angle is varied. The simulations have been carried out for one aspect ratio of 6. Comparison between the Newtonian and the nonNewtonian cases is conducted based on the behaviour of the average Nusselt number with angle of inclination. Both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids exhibit similar behavior with a sudden drop around an angle of 50° associated with flow mode transition from multi-cell to single-cell mode.