CONJUGATE NATURAL CONVECTION IN A POROUS ENCLOSURE SANDWICHED BY FINITE WALLS AND SUBJECTED TO CONVECTION COOLING CONDITION

Abstract

Steady conjugate natural convection heat transfers in a two-dimensional enclosure filled with fluid saturated porous medium is studied numerically. The two vertical boundaries of the enclosure are kept isothermally at same temperature, the horizontal upper wall is adiabatic, and the horizontal lower wall is partially heated. The Darcy extended Brinkman Forcheimer model is used as the momentum equation and Ansys Fluent software is utilized to solve the governing equations. Rayleigh number (1.38 ≤ Ra ≤ 2.32), Darcy number (3.9 * 10-8), the ratio of conjugate wall thickness to its height (0.025 ≤ W ≤ 0.1), heater length to the bottom wall ratio (1/4 ≤  ≤ 3/4) and inclination angle (0°, 30° and 60°) are the main considered parameters. The presented results show the effect of these parameters on the heat transfer and fluid flow characteristics. These results include streamlines, isotherm patterns, and local and average Nusselt number for different values of the governing parameters. It is found that either increasing the Rayleigh number and the ratio of conjugate wall thickness to its height (d/H) or decreasing the ratio of heat source width to bottom wall (l/L), the average Nusselt number is increased. Also, it was observed that the average Nusselt number does not change substantially with inclination angle.