Critical Dimension of a Circular Heat and Solute Source for an Optimum Transfer within Square Porous Enclosures

Abstract

The present work refers to the investigation of natural convection within a partitioned porous enclosure, driven by cooperating thermal and solutal buoyancy forces. The side walls are maintained at a uniform temperature and concentration, lower than that of a circular heat and solute source, which located at the center of the porous square, the rest of the horizontal walls are kept insulated. The physical model for the momentum conservation equation makes use of the Brinkman extension of the classical Darcy equation, the set of coupled equations is solved using the finite volume approach and the SIMPLER algorithm. To account for the impact of the main parameters such the buoyancy ratio; Lewis and porous thermal Rayleigh numbers; as well as the source dimension, heat and mass transfer characteristics are widely inspected and then new powerful correlations are proposed, which predict within ±1% the numerical results. Noted that the validity of the used code was ascertained by comparing our results with experimental data and numerical ones; already available in the literature.