Buoyancy-assisted flow of yield stress fluids past a cylinder: Effect of shape and channel confinement

The aiding-buoyancy mixed convection heat transfer in Bingham plastic fluids from an isothermal cylinder of elliptical and circular shape in a vertical adiabatic channel is numerically investigated. For a fixed shape of the elliptical cylinder E = 2 (ratio of major to minor axes), the effect of confinement is studied for three values of blockage ratio, B, defined as the ratio of the channel width to the circumference of the cylinder/π, as 6.5, 2.17 and 1.3. In order to delineate the role of cross-section of the cylinder, results are also presented here for a circular cylinder of the same heat transfer area as the elliptical cylinder. The results presented herein span the range of conditions as: Bingham number, 0 ≤ Bn ≤ 100, Reynolds number, 1 ≤ Re ≤ 40, and Prandtl number, 1 ≤ Pr ≤ 100 over the range of Richardson number Ri = 0 (pure forced convection) to Ri = 10. Extensive results on drag coefficient, local and surface averaged values of the Nusselt number and yield surfaces are presented herein to elucidate the combined effects of buoyancy, blockage ratio and fluid yield stress. The morphology of the yield surfaces shows that the unyielded plug regions formed upstream and downstream of the cylinder grow faster at low Reynolds numbers with the increasing yield stress effects under the weak buoyancy forces, i.e., small values of Grashof or Richardson number. The heat transfer enhancement is observed with the increasing channel-confinement due to the sharpening of the temperature gradients near the surface of the cylinder. The average Nusselt number shows a positive dependence on the Reynolds number, Prandtl number and Richardson number irrespective of the shape of the cylinder or the type of fluid. By employing the modified definitions of the dimensionless parameters (based on the two choices of the overall effective fluid velocity), predictive correlations have been established for estimating the value of the average Nusselt number in a new application.