This study presents a numerical investigation of laminar and turbulent forced convection in a square ventilated cavity. The main objective of the present work was to replicate the velocity and temperature fields from the reference studies using the OpenFOAM® software, that is free, open-source and without cost to analyze the fluid flow and heat transfer mechanisms under varying Reynolds and Prandtl numbers. The computational domain consists of a square cavity with two openings: an inlet located at the upper left side of vertical wall and an outlet at the lower right vertical wall. The flow is considered steady, incompressible, and Newtonian, with constant thermophysical properties. Boundary conditions include a uniform inlet velocity and a temperature of 299 K, while all cavity walls are assumed adiabatic. The initial temperature in the cavity is set to 300 K. Simulations were carried out using the ‘buoyantSimpleFoam’ solver. Numerical modifications were made to the discretization schemes and relaxation factors, differing from the original study, with the aim of assessing their impact on the stability and accuracy of the solution. The analysis includes velocity vector fields, temperature distributions, internal vortex structures, and the evaluation of local and average Nusselt numbers along the cavity walls. The results obtained are strong agreement with those reported by references, both qualitatively and quantitatively, confirming the reliability of the implemented numerical approach. The study also reinforces the suitability of OpenFOAM® as a robust and flexible platform for simulating fluid flow with heat transfer in engineering systems, even under different numerical settings.
