Fully coupled and operator-splitting approaches for natural convection

We present two different numerical approaches for the simulation of incompressible flow with heat transfer which is described via the Boussinesq model. Exemplarily, we describe a fully coupled approach, which allows both non-steady and steady simulations, while the decoupled approach is based on operator-splitting techniques as typical for fully non-steady incompressible problems. We discuss the numerical and computational characteristics and show results for the MIT2001 benchmark. All results are based on the Open Source CFD tool FEATFLOW