The influence of wall temperature distribution on the mixed convective losses from a heated cavity

Abstract An experimental investigation is presented of the effects of wind speed (0–9 m/s), yaw angle (0° and 90°), and tilt angle (15° and −90°) on the mixed convective heat losses from a cylindrical cavity heated with different internal wall temperature distributions. The internal wall comprised 16 individually controlled heating elements to allow the distribution of the surface temperature to be well controlled, while the air flow was controlled with a wind tunnel. It is found that temperature distribution has a strong influence on the convective heat losses, with a joint dependence on the wind speed and its direction. For the no-wind and side-on wind conditions, the measured range of the heat losses varied by up to 50% with a change in the wall temperature distribution. However, for high head-on wind speeds, this variation reduced down to ∼20%. In addition, the heat losses from downward tilted were ∼3 times larger than the upward facing heated cavity for high wind speeds (typical of tower-mounted and beam-down configurations, respectively). Also, the measured heat losses were found to be only slightly dependent on wind speed and direction in contrast with the downward tilted cases.