Coupled Free and Forced Convection Heat Transfer in a Porous Enclosure Saturated by Nanofluid with Irregular Temperature Distributions on Sidewalls

A two dimensional steady and laminar mixed convection flow in lid-driven porous cavity filled with Cu-water nanofluid is presented in this numerical investigation. The vertical side walls are considered with two spatially varying sinusoidal temperature distributions of different amplitude ratios and phase deviations while the horizontal walls are thermally insulated. The transport equations are solved using finite volume method on a uniformly staggered grid system. The variations of fluid flow, heat transfer, mid-plane velocity, and Nusselt number were discussed over a wide range of Richardson number $(Ri)$ , Darcy number $(Da)$ , porosity $(\epsilon)$ , amplitude ratio $(\epsilon_a)$ , phase deviation $(\phi)$ , and solid volume fraction $(\chi)$ . The results show that the total heat transfer rate increases on increasing Darcy number, amplitude ratio, and solid volume fraction with fixed $Ri$ . For $\phi=\frac{3\pi}{4}$ , the average Nusselt number gets its maximum value when the natural convection dominates. It is found that for $Ri =0.01$ and $1$ , the total heat transfer rate decreases on increasing porosity whereas for $Ri=100$ it is contradictory. It is also observed that the heat transfer is affected mainly on the right side wall where the phase deviation varies from $0$ to $\pi$ . But the effect of $\phi$ is not significant on the left side wall. The sinusoidal temperature distribution along the sidewalls gives better heat transfer rate than the uniform temperature.