Internal thermal source effects on convection heat transfer in a two-dimensional porous medium: A lattice Boltzmann study

Abstract

Regulating the natural convection heat transfer (CHT) in porous media is of vital significance in thermal engineering applications. Here, the CHT in a square cavity filled with a porous medium containing air and an internal thermal source or multiple thermal sources is numerically solved via a thermal lattice Boltzmann (LB) method. The generalized Brinkman-Forchheimer-extended Darcy model and the energy equation are applied to describe the process of momentum transfer and heat transfer, respectively, occurring in the porous medium. The numerical model is validated through comparison with experimental data from the literature. The temperature distributions, flow field inside the porous medium, and average Nusselt number along the thermal source walls are calculated, and the effect on the CHT in the square cavity of varying the location, size, and number of thermal sources are investigated. Results indicate that varying these control parameters shows different enhancement or suppression effects on the CHT along the thermal source walls. The results from this study provide an important reference for regulating CHT in porous media via the presence of internal thermal sources, and they are thus expected to have a significant impact on heat transfer regulation in industrial thermal engineering designs.