Study of Forced Convection in a Pipe Partially Filled with a Porous Medium

Abstract

The objective of the present work was to perform a detailed numerical study of laminar fully developed forced convection in a pipe partially filled with a porous medium. The Brinkman-Forchheimer- extended Darcy model is adopted for the porous matrix region, which is attached at the pipe wall and extends inward, toward the centerline. The effects of the Darcy number Da , the thickness of porous layer S and the thermal conductivity ratio, k R , are investigated. The results showed that as thickness of the porous layer increases or the Darcy number decreases, the pressure drop grows. It was found that, the dependence of the Nusselt number Nu on S is not straightforward. For a higher thermal conductivity porous material, the Nusselt number increases monotonically with increasing S while for a lower value of k R a minimum exists in the Nu distributions. The obtained results show that increasing either the Darcy number or the thermal conductivity of porous material improves the heat transfer. Further, for highly permeable and conducting porous media, it may not be necessary to fill the pipe cross section completely to attain the maximum heat transfer.