Conduction-convection coupled heat transfer around a hollow cylinder under different buoyancy forces

In order to clarify the effect of a buoyancy force on conduction–convection coupled heat transfer in a hollow cylinder, the flow and thermal characteristics were analyzed using an RNG k-ε turbulence model. The Reynolds number was fixed at 1.014 × 10^(6), and the Rayleigh number varied from 1.122 × 10^(10)to 1.088 × 10^(11). Results have shown that, when considering the effect of an opposed buoyancy force, increasing the Rayleigh number has a positive impact on the rate of change and uniformity of the cylinder temperature. The temperature distributions along the axial and circumferential directions are similar for different Rayleigh numbers, but extreme values differ.Along the axial direction, the maximum temperature is obtained at the interface between the variable-diameter part and the constant-diameter part. The maximum dimensionless temperature value decreases to 0.12 when the Rayleigh number increases to 1.088 × 10^(11). Along the circumferential direction, the temperature distribution is affected by the buoyancy force, which results in the temperature of the upper part being higher than that of the lower part. After nondimensionalization of the temperature and time, a correlation was proposed to illustrate the transient heat transfer process quantitatively. The standard deviation of the maximum relative temperature, representing the temperature uniformity, was also calculated. It was found that the difference in the direction of the buoyancy force made a huge difference. Compared with the opposed buoyancy force, the maximum dimensionless temperature is almost two times higher with an assisted buoyancy force. Similarly, the heat transfer coefficient with an assisted buoyancy force is half of that with an opposed buoyancy force. Overall, an assisted buoyancy force plays a negative role in terms of thermal characteristics. The flow field around the hollow cylinder was also illustrated to reveal the mechanism of the buoyancy force on magnitude and direction aspects.