International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, Vol.44, No.10, 1973-1981, 2001
Natural convection heat transfer within multi-layer domes
Domes have become increasingly popular in modern building designs. Glazed domes are used to bring daylight and solar heat into the indoor space. For domes with multiple spaced layers of glazings, there is little information available on natural convection heat transfer within these layers. This information is: required for the evaluation of the dome thermal performance (e.g., the U-factor). This: paper presents a numerical study on heat transfer by laminar natural connection within multi-layer domes with uniform spacing heated from the outside. The Bow and temperature fields within the domed enclosure were obtained using the control volume approach combined with the fully implicit scheme. Correlations for the heat transfer as a function of the dome shape and the gap spacing between the layer were developed under steady-state conditions. The results showed that the convection heat transfer for Fully hemispheric domes (half of spheres) may reach more than 13% higher than that for low profile domes (hemispherical caps) for small gap spacings (gap spacing-to-radius ratio delta < 0.1) and more than 100% for large gap spacings ( > 0.3). The critical gap spacing that yields the maximum heat transfer was quantified for each dome shape. Crown Copyright