NATURAL CONVECTION IN PLANE LAYERS AND CAVITIES WITH VOLUMETRIC ENERGY SOURCES.

This article presents a review of the state of knowledge of natural convection in plane layers and cavities wherein buoyancy is produced by distributed volumetric energy sources. For both types of enclosures, the physics of fluid flow and heat transfer are discussed beginning with small Rayleigh numbers and then proceeding to flows at large Rayleigh numbers, a consideration of Prandtl number effects, and effect of enclosure geometry. The focus is on layers and cavities containing a single component, single-phase fluid. Multi-fluid layer convection, specifically convection in immiscible, multi-component fluid systems has recently received some attention in the literature. However, both experimental and theoretical work in this area are yet in their formative stages and will not be covered in this article. For both the single and multi-fluid layer, hydrodynamic stability is, of course, an important problem and is discussed in another paper in this conference.