Heat transfer and natural convection
Buoyancy-driven and convective heat transfer in OpenFOAM
Natural and forced convection, and pure solid conduction, using buoyantSimpleFoam, buoyantPimpleFoam, the Boussinesq solvers and laplacianFoam.
What it is
Where temperature differences drive the flow themselves. The Boussinesq variants assume density varies only in the buoyancy term, which is cheaper and valid for small temperature differences; the full compressible ones do not.
What the application sets up
- Gravity, reference temperature and the buoyancy formulation
- Thermal boundary conditions with the fields they require
- The pressure reference a sealed enclosure needs
- Material properties per region
Typical uses
- Room and enclosure ventilation
- Natural-convection cooling of an enclosure
- Data centre and cabinet airflow
- Pure conduction through a solid assembly
Industries
Sectors where this analysis is routinely asked for.
- Electronics enclosures
- Building services
- Food & cold chain
- Power electronics
What comes out
- Temperature fields and stratification
- Natural-circulation patterns
- Surface heat transfer rates
- Time to temperature limits
OpenFOAM solvers
buoyantSimpleFoambuoyantPimpleFoambuoyantBoussinesqSimpleFoamlaplacianFoam
Selected and configured for you from the analysis type. You can still see every dictionary the application writes.
In every tier
This analysis type is in the free build. The free tier limits mesh size to 250,000 cells and solving to one core — not which physics you may use.
On accuracy, plainly.
Every analysis type is exercised end to end on every pass — its case is generated, meshed and run — which establishes that the setup is right, not that the answer matches your geometry. No CFD result is evidence until it is checked against something you trust: a measurement, a hand calculation, or a mesh-refinement study the application will run for you. Treat these results with the judgement you would apply to any CFD you set up yourself.