NUMERICAL STUDY OF CONVECTIVE HEAT TRANSFER IN AN INCLINED POROUS ENCLOSURE SATURATED WITH NANOFLUID

Abstract

The addition of nanoscale particles into the fluid is recently a common technology used in several industrial processes, since it has been proved that by introducing particles into the working fluid, the heat transfer characteristics can be improved crucially. However, the understanding of fundamental characteristics of nanofluid saturated porous media domains is still limited. The paper presents a numerical study of free convection in a porous enclosure saturated with a nanofluid. A single-phase mathematical model has been employed assuming that the suspension of nanoparticles in fluid can be modelled as a new fluid with effective properties. Fluid flow in porous media is modelled with the macroscopic Navier–Stokes equations, where the governing parameters are averaged over the representative elementary volume. The obtained set of partial differential equations is solved with use of the numerical code based on the Boundary Element Method, which was primarily developed for pure fluid flow applications and was already proved to be efficient for solving several problems of fluid mechanics. Numerical results for different values of governing parameters are obtained, focusing on the effect of different volume fractions of added nanoparticles and different inclination angles of the porous enclosure on the overall heat transfer through porous domain.