Analytical and numerical study of thermo-solutal convection in pulsating flows between two coaxial cylinders

Abstract

This research reports an analytical and numerical study of thermo-solutal convection in pulsating flows between two coaxial cylinders under a pressure gradient and subject to Dirichlet-type boundary conditions for temperature and concentration along the vertical walls of the annulus. The numerical procedure used in this work is mainly based on the solution of the momentum equations and coupled with the energy and concentration equations. The finite difference method is adopted to solve governing equations using the implicit Crank-Nicolson time marching scheme in the fluid domain and the alternating direction implicit method inside the inner cylinder. The effect of the various parameters such as the fluid-solid conductivity ratio, thermal diffusivity ratio, buoyancy ratio, Lewis number, Richardson number, aspect ratio, and radius ratio on the heat and mass transfer characteristics and the flow structure is presented and discussed. The governing equations are solved analytically after separating into a steady case and an oscillatory case, where an analytical solution for velocity profile, temperature, and concentration distributions is obtained in terms of Bessel’s functions, while the analytical solutions of temperature and concentration profiles are keeping symmetry with the increase of the radius ratio. The results show that the analytical profile can reproduce the three fields obtained numerically and thus for the whole range of parameters.