Majid Tahmasebi Kohyani, Behzad Ghasemi, Ahmad Pasandideh Fard

Frontiers in Heat and Mass Transfer (FHMT) 3 - 023008 (2012)

Natural convection heat transfer in a square cavity with a porous medium subjected to a uniform energy generation per unit volume is studied numerically in this paper. temperature of the vertical walls is Thand Tc. The effective parameters in this condition are Ra and λp which appear in the nondimensionalized equations. Ra is a function of temperature difference between hot and cold walls, and λp is a parameter that depends on the energy generation in the porous medium. Nondimensionalized governing equations are obtained based on the Darcy model; a control volume approach is used for solving these equations. The effects of the variation of two parameters, Ra and λp, on the heat transfer rate, fluid flow and isotherms are investigated. The results of simulations reveal that for a specific λp, an increase of  Ra decreases Teta maxand increases the vortices power. For a constant Ra, however, increasing λp which means more energy generation in the porous medium, makes the cavity warmer and increasesteta max .