Natural convection about a heated horizontal cylinder in a porous medium

Abstract

The natural convection from a heated circular cylinder in an unbounded region of porous medium is investigated for the full range of Rayleigh numbers. At small Rayleigh numbers a qualitative solution is obtained and at large Rayleigh numbers the second-order boundary-layer solution is found that takes into account the first-order plume solution. In order to find the solution at finite Rayleigh numbers the two governing coupled, nonlinear, elliptic partial differential equations are expressed in finite-difference form using a specialized technique which is second-order accurate everywhere. Further, methods are devised which deal with the plume and infinity boundary conditions. Although numerical results are presented for Rayleigh numbers up to 400 solutions of the finite-difference equations can be obtained for higher values of the Rayleigh numbers but in these cases the mesh size used is too large to adequately deal with the developing boundary-layer on the cylinder and the plume.The numerical results show how the theories at both low and high Rayleigh numbers are approached. The plume solution which develops with increasing Rayleigh number agrees with that predicted by the theory presented using the boundary-layer approximation. No separation of the flow at the top of the cylinder is found and there are no indications that it will appear at higher values of the Rayleigh number. The results presented here give reasonable agreement with the existing experimental results for Rayleigh numbers of order unity. However as the Rayleigh number increases to order 102 there is a large discrepancy between the theoretical and experimental results and this is because at these higher values of the Rayleigh number the Darcy approximation has been violated in the experimental results. This indicates the severe limitations of some of the existing theories which use boundary-layer analyses and the Darcy approximation for flows in a porous medium. The application of Darcy's law requires that the size of the pores be much smaller than the scale of the bulk flow and inertial and thermal lengthscales.