Natural convection arising over vertical and horizontal heated flat surfaces is one of the most ubiquitous flows at a range of spatiotemporal scales. Despite significant developments over more than a century contributing to our fundamental understanding of heat transfer in natural convection boundary layers, certain “hidden” characteristics of these flows have received far less attention. Here, we review scattered progress on less visited fundamental topics that have strong implications to heat and mass transfer control. These topics include the instability characteristics, laminar-to-turbulent transition, and spatial flow structures of vertical natural convection boundary layers and large-scale plumes, dome, and circulating flows over discretely and entirely heated horizontal surfaces. Based on the summarized advancements in fundamental research, we elaborate on the selection of perturbations and provide an outlook on the development of perturbation generators and methods of altering large-scale flow structures as a potential means for heat and mass transfer control where natural convection is dominant.

Transient natural convection flows around a thin fin on the sidewall of a differentially heated cavity, which includes a lower intrusion under the fin, a starting plume bypassing the fin and a thermal flow entrained into the vertical thermal boundary layer downstream of the fin in a typical case, are investigated using a scaling analysis and direct numerical simulations. The obtained scaling relations show that the thickness and velocity of the transient natural convection flows around the fin are determined by different dynamic and energy balances, which can be either a buoyancy-viscous balance or a buoyancy-inertial balance, depending on the Rayleigh number, the Prandtl number and the fin length. A time scale of the transition from a buoyancy-viscous flow regime to a buoyancy-inertial flow regime is obtained. The major scaling relations quantifying the transient natural convection flows are also validated by direct numerical simulations. In general, there is a good agreement between the scaling predictions and the corresponding numerical results.