Abstract
Combined natural and forced convection occurring in saturated porous media is an important subject in several engineering fields, including design of high performance thermal insulation systems, packed beds, contaminants flow, and the development of geothermal resources.
The paper presents numerical simulation results on mixed convection flow past a porous cavity located in a porous layer. The steady-state regime is studied for several intensities of the buoyancy effects due to temperature variations. The influences of Péclet and Rayleigh numbers on flow pattern and temperature distributions are examined. Local and global Nusselt numbers are reported for the heated wall.
The differential equations were approximated numerically, being discretized by integration over finite volumes. The fluxes at the volume boundaries were represented using the UNIFAES discretization scheme. The UNIFAES, unified finite approaches exponential scheme for convective-diffusive fluid transport equations, has shown excellent accuracy and stability with irregular grids.
