Abstract:

In order to study the effect of wall temperature and freestream velocity on the characteristics of the boundary layer, the characteristic in a convection boundary layer in air along a vertical heated plate was numerically simulated with CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software. The different wall temperatures for natural convection and the freestream velocity for the combined convection were simulated by the standard kε mode1 and the SIMPLEC algorithm, and the flow fields information, such as distribution of velocity and temperature were computed and analyzed. The results showed that the effect of high temperature oncharacteristics of the boundary layer was quite small,  the thicknesses of velocity and thermal boundary layers decrease, and the maximum velocity increases with the freestream velocity increasing.

Key words: natural convection; combined convection; boundary layer; walltemperature; free-stream velocity