Scaling law of natural convection in a liquid tank irradiated by laser

Based on the mass, momentum, and energy conservation principle, a 3-D unsteady conjugate conduction-natural convection model was developed to simulate the laser irradiation effects on liquid tank. By means of equation analysis, the scaling law for this problem was obtained. According to the scaling law, a full-scale prototype and the corresponding reduced-scale model were established and analysed, respectively. It shows that similarity existed between the full-scale prototype and the reduced-scale model. Moreover, an experiment with the small scale model was performed to verify the numerical model. The measurement results are in good agreement with the ones obtained by the numerical simulation.