Hx is the length of the edge sides of the cubic cavity and Tci is the cold wall temperature.

The radiative Nusselt number used by Yucell et al. in 1989 and some other authors such as Behnia et al. in 1990 is given by:

qrad(Hx, y,z) is interior glazing surface the heat flux.

3.1 Solution Procedure

The conservation equations (1)-(5) and its boundary conditions (6)-(12) were solved using the well known finite-volume method described in detail by Patankar 1980. The SIMPLE algorithm was used in order to couple the velocity and pressure fields. A 21x21x21 no uniform grid was used and near the wall surfaces a finer grid was used. All equations were coupled and solved using a iterative procedure. The iterative solution procedure was terminated when the residuals of all grid points, normalized by suitable reference quantities, felt below 0.01 percent. Knowing the temperature distributions and the heat flux through the glazing, the solar heat gain coefficient can be calculated by [ASHRAE, 2001]:

where G is the solar radiation that strikes the exterior surface of the glazing, т is the transmissivity of the glazing and q, is the total thermal heat flux through the glazing.

2. Results

Table 1 shows the input parameters that were used in the numerical code from the mathematical model.