Thermal Analysis of Heat-Generating Pools Bounded From Below by Curved Surfaces

A computer code that features the use of a directional effective thermal conductivity in modeling natural convection in heat-generating pools has been developed to analyze heat transfer in such pools, which are bounded from below by curved surfaces. Illustrative calculations pertaining to two published experimental studies on convective heat transfer in water pools with uniformly distributed volumetric energy sources are carried out using the code. The water pools used in the two studies under consideration were cooled either from the top or from the bottom, but not from both. The utility as well as the limitations of the effective thermal conductivity approach in the context of addressing the issue of melt-pool coolability is demonstrated by comparisons of calculated results with the experimental data.