Convective heat transfer enhancement in an inverted T-shaped porous enclosure through vertical varying circular cylinder

Abstract

This research aims to enhance convective thermal transport in an inverted T-shaped porous enclosure filled with a water-based hybrid nanofluid, incorporating a circular cylinder at different vertical locations (Case C1-no cylinder, Case C1-cylinder at (0.5, 0.25), Case C2-cylinder at (0.5, 0.5), Case C3-cylinder at (0.5, 0.75)). The numerical investigation employs the penalty finite element technique to simulate the Darcy–Brinkmann–Forchheimer-based mathematical model. Moreover, the complete results of streamlines, isotherms, mean Nusselt number (Num ), and thermal enhancement percentage ( En % ) are analyzed at the broad range of flow parameters, including Rayleigh number ( Ra = ( 10 3 − 10 6 ) ), Darcy number ( Da = ( 10 − 5 − 10 − 2 ) ), and porosity value ( ϵ = ( 0.1 − 0.9 ) ). Initial comparative investigations of different configurations (C0–C3) at selected Ra values reveal that case C1 exhibits significant potential for enhancing convective heat transport phenomena. Consequently, only case C1 physical domain has been explicitly analyzed for convective heat and fluid flow characteristics at the selected range of flow parameters. Further, it is analyzed that the increasing range of Ra, Da, and ϵ enhances the convective heat and fluid flow phenomena. Furthermore, the comparative study of Num and En % for case C1 against the simple case C0 reveals substantial improvements as Ra, Da, and ϵ increase. The En % for Da and Ra reaches up to 97%, while a maximum of 25% improvement is observed with varying values of ϵ. These findings highlight the promising opportunities to optimize convective thermal transport in the investigated system, mainly through adopting case C1.