Laminar Incompressible Recirculating Flow in a Driven Cavity of Polar Cross Section

Abstract

The driven flow in a polar cavity has been analyzed using the complete Navier-Stokes equations formulated in terms of a stream function and vorticity. An alternating-direction implicit method, with careful treatment of the convective terms in the equations, is used to obtain the numerical solutions. Results are obtained for the stream function, vorticity, velocities and pressure for various values of the two characteristic parameters of the problem, namely, the flow Reynolds number Re and the aspect ratio of the cavity. The formulation is general and produces results for the driven rectangular cavity-flow problem as a special case. Good agreement is obtained between the present solutions for this case and available corresponding results. The overall features of the driven polar-cavity flow are found to be generally similar to those for the rectangular cavity.