Cancellation of the Heating Piston Effect by Convective Enhancement of a Cooling Piston Effect

This work brings new insight to the question of the piston effect, which has been found to be the main cause of temperature equilibration in the vicinity of the liquid-vapor critical point under weightlessness conditions. The thermalization process of a near-critical fluid confined in a cavity and submitted to local heating is modeled with special emphasis on the role of gravity and boundary conditions. The solution of the unsteady Navier-Stokes equations written for a hypercompressible low-heat-diffusing van der Waals gas is obtained in a 2-D configuration by means of a finite-volume numerical code. Under Earth gravity conditions, the results show that the thermal plume rising from a heat source strongly decreases and rapidly cancels bulk fluid heating when it strikes the top thermostated wall. It is proved that convection does not prevent heat transfer by the piston effect but that it causes a sudden enhancement of the cooling piston effect generated at the thermostated top boundary, which leads to an early equilibrium between the cooling and heating piston effects