Albeit laboratory experiments and numerical simulations have proven themselves successful in enhancing our understanding of long-living large-scale flow structures in horizontally extended Rayleigh–Bénard convection, some discrepancies with respect to their size and induced heat transfer remain. This study traces these discrepancies back to their origins. We start by generating a digital twin of one standard experimental set-up. This twin is subsequently simplified in steps to understand the effect of non-ideal thermal boundary conditions, and the experimental measurement procedure is mimicked using numerical data. Although this allows for explaining the increased observed size of the flow structures in the experiment relative to past numerical simulations, our data suggests that the vertical velocity magnitude has been underestimated in the experiments. A subsequent reassessment of the latter's original data reveals an incorrect calibration model. The reprocessed data show a relative increase in $u_{z}$ of roughly $24\,\%$, resolving the previously observed discrepancies. This digital twin of a laboratory experiment for thermal convection at Rayleigh numbers $Ra = \{ 2, 4, 7 \} \times 10^{5}$, a Prandtl number $Pr = 7.1$ and an aspect ratio $\varGamma = 25$ highlights the role of different thermal boundary conditions as well as a reliable calibration and measurement procedure.

In this study, attention is focused on the numerical simulations of laminar fluid flow and heat transfer in straight smooth-walled parallelogram channels with various aspect ratios (α) and inclined angles (θ). The Reynolds number (Re), characterized by the channel hydraulic diameter and the working fluid of water, is fixed at 100. The examined α and θ range from 1 to 10 and 45° to 90°, respectively. Their effects on the thermal fluid features are explored under three thermal boundary conditions: constant wall temperature (TBC), constant axial heat transfer rate with constant peripheral temperature (H1BC), and constant wall heat flux (H2BC). The SIMPLE algorithm is employed for velocity–pressure coupling with the algebraic multigrid method, while the second-order upwind scheme is utilized for spatial discretization in pressure term; the momentum and energy equations are solved with a QUICK scheme; Least Squares Cell-Based Gradient Evaluation is applied for predicting scalar values at the cell faces and for computing secondary diffusion terms and velocity derivatives. One of the new findings is that there exists a critical value of θ = 70° below which the Nusselt number under H2BC increases with increasing α whereas beyond which the trend reverses, a result distinct from those computed with TBC and H1BC. Moreover, TBC is found to be a time-saving alternative to H1BC. Furthermore, both Nusselt numbers under the three thermal boundary conditions and friction factor times Re are successfully and compactly correlated with α and θ to offer useful reference for designing micro-cooling channels.