A Unified Treatment for Local Thermal Nonequilibrium Free, Forced, and Mixed Convective Boundary Layer Flows Over an Arbitrarily Shaped Nonisothermal Body in a Fluid Saturated Porous Medium

A unified integral solution procedure has been proposed to analyze all possible Darcian local thermal nonequilibrium (LTNE) free, forced, and mixed convective boundary layer flows, commonly encountered in porous media engineering applications. The heated body may be arbitrarily shaped, and its temperature may vary over the surface. The integral energy equation for the solid phase yields an algebraic equation between the dimensionless fluid thermal boundary layer thickness and its ratio to the solid-phase counterpart, while the integral energy equation for the fluid phase reduces to a first order ordinary differential equation in terms of the dimensionless fluid thermal boundary layer thickness. This set of the equations for determining the local Nusselt number of our primary interest proved to be valid for all possible Darcian cases of LTNE free, forced, and mixed convective boundary layer flows over an arbitrarily shaped nonisothermal body in a fluid saturated porous medium. Asymptotic expressions for the cases of arbitrary shapes were also obtained analytically for both leading edge and far downstream regions. The results are found to agree well with available direct numerical integration results. Furthermore, the regime map has been constructed to show the boundary layer transition point from the LTNE to equilibrium. The proposed unified method is found quite useful when designing thermal engineering systems associated with fluid saturated porous media.