A numerical simulation of natural convection in a porous enclosure with nanofluid

Abstract

In day-to-day life, heat transfer has several applications and hence we have many research areas of interest to learn new things. Nanoparticles improve the characteristics of heat transfer due to the random motion of particles. In this study, a computational approach is used to study natural convection in a porous enclosure with nanofluid. The convective term is solved by the QUICK scheme, and the finite difference method is used to solve the stream function with a 60 × 60 mesh size. CuO-water nanofluid is used in this work since nanoparticles are widely used in almost all engineering fields. In this study, we considered a two-dimensional complex cavity which is solved mathematically by using the Boussinesq approximation method. For validation of the software code, the obtained results are compared with the existing results in the literature and are found to be in good agreement. We see distortion of isotherms increases with an increase in the Rayleigh number and the nanoparticle content. That is, heat transfer takes place by natural convection very fast. Nusselt number increases with increasing nanofluid particles and the Rayleigh number. Also, it can be concluded that the heat transfer is a strong function of the Darcy number and The Rayleigh number.