Thermal Performance of Convective-Radiative Heat Transfer in Porous Fins

Abstract

Forced and natural convection in porous fins with convective coefficient at the tips under radiation and convection effects are investigated in this paper. Aluminum and copper as fin materials are investigated. In forced and natural convection, air and water are applied as working fluids, respectively. In order to solve this nonlinear equation, Homotopy Perturbation Method (HPM) and Variational Iteration Method (VIM) are used. To verify the accuracy of the methods, a comparison is made to the exact solution (BVP). In this work, the effects of porosity parameter (), Radiation parameter (α) and Temperature-Ratio parameter (µ) on non-dimensional temperature distribution for both of the flows are shown. The results show that the effects of (α) and (µ) on temperature distribution in natural convection are based on porosity and in forced convection are uniform, approximately. Also, it is shown that both VIM and HPM are capable of being used to solve this nonlinear heat transfer equation. doi:10.14456/WJST.2014.64

Keywords

• Forced convection
• natural convection
• porous fin
• variational iteration method (VIM)
• homotopy perturbation method (HPM)