HEAT TRANSFER IN A POROUS CAVITY

The current work is undertaken to analyze the movement of fluid and thermal energy due to uneven heating of a porous medium confined in a cavity. The emphasis is given to heating at one of the vertical wall of the cavity with non-uniform temperature which leads to lesser amount of heat content at lower section of the porous medium as compared to that of upper section. The boundary conditions are maintained in such way to heat the left vertical surface of the cavity unevenly with power law coefficient λ. Two distinct cases are evaluated corresponding to different conditions at left and top wall. Case I belongs to the condition when the top and right wall is cooled to temperature cT . The bottom horizontal surface of cavity is adiabatic. Case II is such that the top wall is cooled to temperature c T but the right and bottom wall are adiabatic. Current numerical scheme is based on finite element method that yields the solution to know the temperature and velocity distribution in the domain. It is found that the Nusselt number is generally higher at the upper portion of the cavity. For λ=0 the heat transfer rate found to decrease continuously until 85% of the cavity height and then starts to increase. For λ=0 .33 and 1, it is revealed that the thermal energy penetration into the depth of porous medium has increased due to insulating the right wall of the cavity