Eddie Leonardi Memorial Lecture: “Natural Convection From Earth to Space”

This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Professor Eddie Leonardi, formerly International Heat Transfer Conference (IHTC-13) Secretary, who tragically died at an early age on December 14, 2008. Eddie Leonardi had a large range of research interests: he worked in both computational fluid dynamics/heat transfer and refrigeration and air-conditioning for over 25 years. However starting from his Ph.D. ‘A numerical study of the effects of fluid properties on natural convection’ awarded in 1984, one of his main passions has been natural convection and therefore the focus of this lecture will be on what Eddie Leonardi has achieved in numerical and experimental investigations of laminar natural convective flows. A number of examples will be presented which illustrate important difficulties of numerical calculations and experimental comparisons. Eddie Leonardi demonstrated that variable properties have important effects and significant differences occur when different fluids are used, so that dimensionless formulation is not appropriate when dealing with flows of fluids with significant changes in transport properties. Difficulties in comparing numerical solutions with either numerically generated data or experimental results will be discussed with reference to two-dimensional natural convection and three-dimensional Rayleigh–Bénard convection. For a number of years Eddie Leonardi was involved in a joint US-French-Australian research program—the MEPHISTO experiment on crystal growth—and studied the effects of convection on solidification and melting under microgravity conditions. Some results of this research will be described. Finally, some results of experimental and numerical studies of natural convection for building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) applications in which Eddie Leonardi had been working in the last few years will be also presented.