Natural Convection Heat Transfer Inside a Square Enclosure with a Flexible Fin

The present study aims to address the effect of the presence of a flexible fin on the natural convection heat transfer inside a square cavity. A flexible fin is placed on the left vertical wall by initial tilted angle 30o from the horizontal direction. An Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian method for fluid-structure (fluid-flexible fin) interaction is utilized. Based on this method, the governing system of equations for laminar fluid and heat transfer is formulated into a non- dimensional form and then solved using the finite element method and then results accuracy evaluated against previous valid studies. The results are plotted for an enclosure containing a flexible fin as well as a solid fin in the non-dimensional time interval of 0 to 0.07 and in the Rayleigh number range of 106 to 2×107 and the fin tilted angle of -10° to °. The results show that the presence of a flexible fin deteriorates the heat transfer compared to a solid fin. In other words, using an insulated fin instead of a conductive fin makes different patterns for average Nusselt number curve in a range time and causes a reduction of the rate of heat transfer. Also, the presence of a flexible fin mounted on the hot wall especially affects the average Nusselt number in the areas above the fin location and induces oscillating heat transfer patterns.