Unsteady natural convection within a differentially heated porous enclosure

ABSTRACT: Investigation on heat transfer performance of porous enclosure is numerically performed. The working fluid is air and the square cavity is heated from left side wall and the right edge is cold. Two other walls including top and bottom edge are kept as adiabatic. The mentioned above feature is used in several practical and industrial fields of engineering such as solar collectors. FLUENT 6.3 were used for simulating some specified case studies to control the amount of heat transferred through the media. Validating the work, we employed a simple porous enclosure of air to see how well we predict the previous results of researchers for square configuration. Then, there are distinct cases which we considered: using an insulated block on bottom/ top edge, couple insulated blocks at top and bottom and block within the media. All designed cases let the thermal system manufacturers know and produce a device much more economical. To have better insight to the rate of heat transfer, all studied cases are investigated from the starting time of the heating up to a steady state condition. Keywords: Unsteady natural convection, Porous enclosure, Computational fluid dynamics. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………