LAUSR

The present study deals with an unsteady laminar free convection inside the annuli confined between an outer square enclosure and an inner circular cylinder. The annuli are filled with non-Newtonian power law fluids. The inner cylinder is located at three positions along the vertical center line. The unsteadiness arising due to bifurcation of flow from steady state is also reported in this study. The flow characteristics were found to be steady in nature in case of shear thickening fluid. However, most of the cases in the shear thinning fluid regime are found to be unsteady in nature with periodic and non-periodic fluctuations. The bifurcation of the flow from steady to unsteady state is mainly governed by the location of the cylinder as well as the characteristics of non-Newtonian fluid. The Bernard cells arising due to very high convective flow at Ra = 107 are also observed in the flow fields.