Computation of heated swirling flows with a fully-coupled numerical scheme

Abstract

This paper reports numerical results obtained with a point-wise block-implicit scheme. Computations are presented for the case of incompressible laminar heated flow with swirl in a vertical cylindrical chamber. Governing equations are written in terms of the so-called primitive variables and are recast into a general form. The discretized momentum equations are applied to each cell face and then, together with the mass-continuity, tangential velocity and energy equations, are solved directly in each computational node. Results are obtained with a Personal Computer under reasonable computing times. Flow pattern and mass residual behavior are reported. Further, it is also expected that more advanced parallel computer architectures can benefit from the error smoothing operator here described.