Convective heat transfer in building energy analysis

In the ongoing efforts to study energy consumption in buildings through computer simulations, practically no attention has been given to modeling natural convective heat transfer in buildings. The main reason for this neglect is due to the difficulty of solving the problem numerically. This paper makes a contribution towards the solution of this difficulty by presenting a numerical code for modeling natural convection in rectangular enclosures at Rayleigh numbers up to 10/sup 10/. Chapter 2 develops the general equations of motion to be solved. Chapter 3 is devoted to simplification of these equations and description of the numerical scheme. Chapter 4 describes the comparisons of the predictions of the computer program based on the numerical scheme with various published experimental and numerical results of other investigators. Chapter 5 illustrates an application of the computer program to investigate the soundness of an assumption commonly made by all the building energy analysis programs.