Numerical Investigation of Fluid Flow Inside A Rectangular Driven Cavity at Moderate Reynolds Numbers

Abstract

This work presents a numerical investigation of a 2-D incompressible driven cavity flow at moderate Reynolds numbers. Lid driven cavity is widely considered to be a benchmark problem because of its capability of displaying the cogency of different numerical schemes and easily analysing different fluid phenomenon in a simple geometrical arrangement. A steady numerical solution is determined using a pressure-based segregated algorithm; SIMPLE and the simulation is done in the commercially available CFD software ANSYS FLUENT (Academic Version 18.1). The flow is studied for various aspect ratios (1≤K≤4) at moderate Reynolds numbers 100, 400, 1000, 3200 and 5000 in uniform cartesian grids. The events mainly characterizing developments in primary and secondary vortices, their locations and the velocity profile are explained in detail. Moreover, an effort has been made to show the merging of corner vortices to a new primary vortex for different Reynolds number and also compute the critical aspect ratio (Kcr) value for Reynolds number 50, 100 and 400. The results obtained in this work are compared with standards given by Ghia et al. and a good agreement of the result is observed.
Keywords: Lid driven cavity, 2-D incompressible, SIMPLE, Reynolds number, aspect ratio, critical aspect ratio

Cite this Article
Pantha Pradip Das, Kalyan Kumar Das. Numerical Investigation of Fluid Flow Inside A Rectangular Driven Cavity at Moderate Reynolds Numbers. Journal of Aerospace Engineering & Technology. 2017; 7(3): 46–60p.