NATURAL CONVECTION IN A WAVY POROUS ENCLOSURE HEATED BY AN INTERNAL CIRCULAR CYLINDER

Abstract

Natural convection fluid flow and heat transfer of fluid-saturated porous media heated by an internal circular cylinder inside a wavy enclosure is investigated numerically. The 2D enclosure is composed of two isothermal vertical wavy walls and two adiabatic horizontal flat walls. Darcy assumption and Boussinesq approximation were relied on in this steady, incompressible study. The governing equations were solved using Galerkin finite element method implemented in FlexPDE software package. The performance of enclosure was evaluated by three non-dimensional parameters namely, the Darcy-modified Rayleigh number Ram (100-1000), the waviness ratio λ (0-0.35), and the position of the inner heated cylinder ξ (0.45-1.05). The results were presented by visualization of the streamline and isothermal contours and by the local and average Nusselt numbers. It was found that the lower the position of the inner cylinder (ξ=0.45) is the largest the values of Nusselt number while the influence of the wall waviness ratio is found to be very small.