A numerical and experimental study on the unsteady conjugate natural convection boundary layers in a water filled rectangular cavity with a conducting partition wall at varied locations

This paper presents some preliminary results on the behavior of unsteady conjugate natural convection boundary layers (CNCBLs) in a water filled rectangular cavity with a partition wall at varied locations through a series of experiments and twodimensional direct numerical simulations (DNS). The experiments were carried out over 2.428×10^9 ≤ Ra ≤ 2.458×10^10 and 5.3701 ≤ Pr ≤ 6.1697, with the partition wall placed at the center of the cavity, where Ra and Pr are the Rayleigh and Prandtl numbers, respectively. The temperatures at eight locations in the cavity were measured by Resistance Temperature Detectors (RTDs). The DNS runs were carried out using a code developed in house based on the finite-difference method and written in Visual C#.NET programming language. The DNS runs complement and expand the experiments by providing additional information about the behavior of unsteady CNCBLs and the effects of the variation of the partition position