Natural Convection From a Porous Cavity With Sublayers of Nonuniform Thickness: A Lumped System Analysis

A numerical study has been performed to further investigate the flow and temperature fields in layered porous cavity. The geometry considered is a two-dimensional square cavity comprising of three or four vertical sublayers with nonuniform thickness and distinct permeability. The cavity is subjected to differential heating from the vertical walls. The results obtained are used to further evaluate the capacity of the lumped-system analysis in the prediction of heat transfer results of layered porous cavities. It has been found that predictions by the lumped-system model are reasonably good for the range of Rayleigh numbers encountered in engineering applications. In addition, the predictions improve when the number of sublayers increases as well as the sublayer thickness becomes more uniform. Thus, it proves that the lumped-system analysis can offer a quick estimate of heat transfer result from a layered porous cavity with reasonable accuracy.