Validação do código livre OpenFOAM através da obtenção de coeficientes de transferência de calor

Abstract

The demand for increasingly complex studies on heat transfer is strengthening Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques. Among these, the OpenFOAM software stands out due to its free availability and freedom to modify the code. In this sense, there is an urgent need for increasingly rigorous validation of these tools that aim to simulate reality. The validation experiments were all conducted using powerful workstations, and within the software, the buoyantFoam solver was chosen, focused on energy transport due to natural buoyancy forces. It was decided to work with natural convection in different Rayleigh ranges for quiescent air over a horizontal cylinder heated to temperatures that would ensure both compressible systems and systems where incompressibility would be modeled using the Boussinesq approximation. The results obtained were satisfactory when compared to well-established empirical correlations, considering that, for compressible systems, the errors ranged from -0.85% to 9.14%, and for incompressible systems the errors fell between -5.90% and -0.51%.