A general treatment for non-Darcy film condensation within a porous medium in the presence of gravity and forced flow

Abstract

Non-Darcy film condensation over a vertical flat plate within a porous medium is considered. The Forchheimer extended Darcy model is adopted to account for the non-Darcy effects on film condensation in the presence of both gravity and externally forced flow. A general similarity transformation is proposed upon introducing a modified Peclet number based on the total velocity of condensate, resulting from both gravitational force and externally forced flow. This general treatment makes it possible to obtain all possible similarity solutions including the asymptotic results in the four different limiting regimes, namely, Darcy forced convection regime, Forchheimer forced convection regime, Darcy body force predominant regime and Forchheimer body force predominant regime. Appropriate dimensionless groups for distinguishing these asymptotic regimes are found to be the micro-scale Grashof and Reynolds numbers based on the square root of the permeability of the porous medium. Correspondingly, the non-Darcy effect on the heat transfer rate are investigated in terms of these micro-scale dimensionless numbers.