Numerical simulations of convection heat transfer in porous media using a cascaded lattice Boltzmann method

Abstract

Convection heat transfer in porous media is a universal phenomenon in nature, and it is also frequently encountered in scientific and engineering fields. An in-depth understanding of the fundamental mechanism of convection heat transfer in porous media requires efficient and powerful numerical tools. In this paper, a cascaded lattice Boltzmann (CLB) method for convection heat transfer in porous media at the representative elementary volume (REV) scale is presented. In the CLB method, the flow field is solved by an isothermal CLB model with the D2Q9 lattice based on the generalized non-Darcy model, while the temperature field is solved by a temperature-based CLB model with the D2Q5 lattice. The key point is to incorporate the influence of the porous media into the CLB method by introducing the porosity and heat capacity ratio into the shift matrices. The effectiveness and practicability of the present method are validated by numerical simulations of several heat transfer problems in porous media at the REV scale. It is shown that the present method for convection heat transfer in porous media is second-order accurate in space. Moreover, in comparison with the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook lattice Boltzmann method, the present method has sufficient tunable parameters and possesses better numerical stability.