Numerical Simulations of Flow, Heat Transfer and Conjugate Heat Transfer in the Backward-Facing Step Geometry

Abstract

The objective of this study is to employ the backward-facing step (BFS) flow to verify the implementation of an in-house solver of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and energy equation. Additionally, the accuracy and availability of numerical data found in the literature for this problem will be evaluated for fluid flow, heat transfer and conjugate heat transfer cases. For fluid flow, a case with Reynolds number equal to 800 is simulated. Excellent agreement is found with numerical data reported in the literature. For heat and conjugate heat transfer, numerical data is less findablethan in the fluid flow case. For heat transfer, present results show differences with available data. Therefore, aheavily tested numerical solver is employed: OpenFoam, as other source of data. Its results agreewell with the in-house solver and this suggests that published results may not be fully converged. For conjugate heat transfera benchmark case is found and is used to be compared with actual simulations. OpenFoam show good agreement with the in-house solver but the benchmark data cannot be well compared. Therefore, further analysis is recommended to find the origin of this disagreement. Data from present simulations for the heat transfer cases is provided in a useful form to be employed for verification and validation purposes.