THE THERMAL CAPACITOR METHOD: NUMERICAL VERIFICATION OF TURBULENT NATURAL CONVECTION IN AN ENCLOSED CAVITY

A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) based code for simulating turbulent natural convection with the Thermal Capacitor Method (TCM) is presented in this work. The problem consists of a tall cavity enclosed with a temperature difference between two opposite walls. The continuity, Navier–Stokes, energy, and Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) k–ω SST equations were discretized in space and time using the Finite Volume Method (FVM) to achieve a converged numerical solution. An in-house CUDA-C language code was implemented, which allowed the use of a GPU as a processing device for the problem solution. The results were compared against ANSYS Fluent^®, and experimental data. The GPU-based code associated with the TCM exhibited good performance in comparison with the commercial software.