This paper presents axi symmetric 2D numerical investigation of the spherical thermocouple calibration furnace in a rectangular enclosure. The focus is on the flow structure inside the Saturn (a hollow spherical cavity), external flow behavior due to annulus block heating and the surface temperature uniformity. Mesh sensitivity analysis is adopted to extract the mesh with minimum number of nodes but with fast convergent finite element solution. The basic strategy here is that temperature perturbation error at a single point instead of a single element contributed to the total perturbation error qualitatively remains the same. Agreement between numerical simulation results and the experiment results is good with a maximum temperature deviation 10. °C for the cavity temperature 400. °C. Finally, standard numerical temperature uncertainty due to variation in thermal conductivity is computed through the sensitivity coefficient using uncertainty analysis. © 2011 Elsevier Inc.