Natural and Mixed Convection in Square Vented Enclosure Filled with Metal Foam

Abstract

Steady natural and mixed convection flow in a square vented enclosure filled with water-saturated aluminum metal foam is numerically investigated. The left vertical wall is kept at constant temperature and the remaining walls are thermally insulated. Forced convection is imposed by providing an inlet at cavity bottom surface, and a vent at the top surface. Natural convection takes place due to the temperature difference inside the enclosure. Darcy-Brinkman-Forchheimer model for fluid flow and the two-equation of the local thermal non-equilibrium model for heat flow was adopted to describe the flow characteristics within the porous cavity. Numerical results are obtained for a wide range of width of the inlet as a fraction of the height of the enclosure (), the porosity of aluminum foams (, ), Grashof numbers (), and Reynolds number (). Effects of pertinent physical parameters are performed in terms of the flow and temperature fields, as well as the average Nusselt number variations. The results show that the average Nusselt number increases with  and  and decreases with the porosity increasing. The fluid temperature distribution has a little difference from the solid matrix temperature distribution.