Mixed Convection in a Square Cavity Filled with Porous Medium with Bottom Wall Periodic Boundary Condition

Abstract

Transient mixed convection heat transfer in a confined porous medium heated at periodic sinusoidal heat flux is investigated numerically in the present paper. The Poisson-type pressure equation, resulted from the substituting of the momentum Darcy equation in the continuity equation, was discretized by using finite volume technique. The energy equation was solved by a fully implicit control volume-based finite difference formulation for the diffusion terms with the use of the quadratic upstream interpolation for convective kinetics scheme to discretize the convective terms and the temperature values at the control volume faces. The numerical study covers a range of the hydrostatic pressure sinusoidal amplitude range and time period values of . Numerical results show that the pressure contours lines are influenced by hydrostatic head variation and not affected with the sinusoidal amplitude and time period variation. It is found that the average Nusselt number decreases with time and pressure head increasing and decreases periodically with time and amplitude increasing. The time averaged Nusselt number decreases with imposed sinusoidal amplitude and cycle time period increasing.

Keywords

• Porous medium, mixed convection, square cavity, sinusoidal periodic heating, finite volume method.