Developing laminar natural convection of power law fluids in vertical open ended channel

Abstract Steady, developing laminar natural convection heat transfer for power law fluids between two parallel vertical plates where the fluid is entrained from the bottom and exiting from top is studied. The results for asymmetric and symmetric configurations of the heated plates, which are kept at uniform temperatures with an aspect ratio of 40, are presented. For the numerical computations, the ANSYS Workbench Fluent commercial package is used to solve the governing equations and its numerical output is post-processed. Various range values of Rayleigh number ( Ra  = 10 4 , 10 5 , 10 6 ) Prandtl number ( Pr  = 10, 100, 1000), non-Newtonian power law indexes ( 0.6 ⩽ n ⩽ 1.4 ) of the fluids and the temperature ratios of colder and hotter walls ( r T  = 0, 0.5, 1.0) are considered. The temperature and velocity profiles, and the average Nusselt number distributions are presented. Comparisons between Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids are made in terms of the variations of the average Nusselt number as a function of the non-dimensional governing parameters.