According to the monitors, residuals for k and epsilon seem a bit high but have a reducing trend. The temperature monitors seem to behaving as they should with a rising fluid temp and solid wall temp. The behaviour of massflux report is not exactly at zero but in the order of e-4 and consequently at this point the continuity residual is still a bit high too. The solution is initialized with a 24 bar pressure in the domain as the outlet BC is 21.4 bar to avoid previously faced Reverse Flow problems. Just after the simulation starts facing convergence difficulties the pressure starts to peak. On observing the contours, small circular regions of high pressure (~30 bar) can be seen near the lower heated wall.Â
About the mesh, no inflation layers are used. The aspect ratio is still a bit high though as this mesh was made using a reference paper. I have tried with a mesh with lesser Facial Aspect Ratio and have incurred the same problem. The axial node distribution has been studied in many previous researches and has shown to have no significant effect on the results so a suitable number of nodes have been used (530) to keep computation time in check. Here's a picture of the mesh:
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