Study of natural convection in a porous trapezoidal cavity with a square body at the center of the enclosure

Abstract EN

Steady state free convection heat transfer in a two dimensional trapezoidal enclosure filled with a fluid-saturated porous medium with a square solid body located at the center of cavity, is performed in this study.

The bottom wall of the cavity was heated with a sinusoidal temperature distribution θ λ (1 cos (2 π X)) the inclined walls are insulated (adiabatic) and the top wall is maintained at θ 0.

To obtain the effects of the presence of a square body on heat transfer and fluid flow inside the enclosure, three different temperature boundary conditions were applied for the body as cold (θbody = 0) , heated (θbody = 1) and adiabatic (0) at different Ra numbers.

In this study, the governing equations were solved numerically using finite element software package (FLEXPDE).

Results for the mean Nusselt number, Num, the contour maps of the streamlines and isotherms are presented.

It is observed that fluid flow and temperature fields strongly depend on thermal boundary conditions of the body.

A comparison of the flow field, isotherm field and averaged Nusselt number, Num with previous work, which revealed a good agreement.