Buoyant convection in porous annulus with discrete sources-sink pairs and internal heat generation

Abstract

In the present analysis, numerical investigation of buoyancy-driven convective thermal transport in a vertical annulus has been performed when the interior and exterior cylinders are discretely heated and cooled by heat source-sink pair arrangements. The upper and lower boundaries and unheated parts of inner and outer cylinders are insulated. For the porous annulus, the Brinkman-extended Darcy formulation is adopted for modeling the fluid flow in the porous medium. Also, the effects of internal heat generation are investigated. The governing equations in terms of vorticity-stream function formulation are solved by an implicit finite difference technique based ADI and SLOR methods. In particular, the study is focused on the effects of different sources and sinks arrangements on the convective flow and associated thermal transport features.