Darcy-Forchheimer natural convection flow along a complex roughened surface

Abstract

The influence of complex roughened surface on the Darcy-Forchheimer natural convection flow is investigated numerically. A natural convection flow within porous medium occurs in a variety of engineering applications that include solar power collectors that are used to control the pollutant spread, cooling of nuclear reactors, and geothermal engineering. Recent research has focused on reducing skin friction drag induced by viscous forces acting on a rigid body surface as it moves through a fluid by considering roughened surface or mass transfer (mass injection or suction) at the surface. The purpose of this study is to investigate how much skin friction drag reduces by considering complex roughened surface in Darcy-Forchheimer natural convection flow. A mathematical model is obtained in the form of nonlinear PDEs by transferring surface roughness effect from boundary to governing equations and made dimensionless through suitable scaling variables. To obtain a numerical solution for resulting nonlinear PDEs, a finite difference scheme is applied. The results reveal that skin friction drag reduces by making roughened surface a complex surface and further reduces by adding the combined effects of Darcy and Forchheimer numbers also total heat transfer rate enhances by increasing the values of Darcy as well as Forchheimer numbers. These results seem novel findings in this study.