Analytical and numerical study of double diffusive convection in a vertical enclosure

This paper presents an analytical and numerical study of natural convection of a double-diffusive fluid contained in a rectangular slot subject to uniform heat and mass fluxes along the vertical sides. Governing parameters of the problem under study are the thermal Rayleigh number, Ra _T ; buoyancy ratio, N; Lewis number, Le; Prandtl number, Pr and aspect ratio of the cavity, A. In the first part of the analytical study a scale analysis is applied to the two extreme cases of heat-transfer and mass-transfer-driven flows. In the second part, an analytical solution, based on the parallel flow approximation, is reported for tall enclosures (A?1). Solutions for the flow fields, temperature and concentration distributions and Nusselt and Sherwood numbers are obtained in terms of the governing parameters of the problem. In the limits of heat-driven and solute-driven flows a good agreement is obtained between the prediction of the scale analysis and those of the analytical solution. The numerical solutions are based on the complete governing equations for two-dimensional flows, and cover the range 1≤Ra _T ≤10⁷, 0≤N≤10⁵, 10^-3≤Le≤10³, 1≤A≤20 and Pr=7. A good agreement is found between the analytical predictions and the numerical simulation.