EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION INTO THE INFLUENCE OF POROUS MEDIA ON THE MIXED CONVECTION HEAT TRANSFER INDUCED INSIDE SECTOR-SHAPED
CHANNEL
Author(s):
Muna S. Kassim*
Affiliation(s):
Mechanical Engineering Department, Engineering, College, Mustansiriyah University, Baghdad – Iraq
*Corresponding Author Email: [email protected]
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This paper presents the results of an experimental study that was developed in order to analyze the thermal energy exchanged and produced by means of convection between a flowing fluid and the internal surface of a channel, completely filled with a saturated porous medium, while the side walls were subjected to a constant and uniform heat flux and the lower and upper walls were perfectly insulated by thermal means. The experiment was conducted in the thermally and hydro-dynamically fully developed flow region. During the experiments, the local Nusselt number and temperature distribution along the channel length have been studied for Peclet number range of (65.2-384.6) and Rayleigh number range of (3.5-189.2). The results obtained after performing this experimental evaluation indicated that the porous mediums play an important role in the thermal exchange process. Also, it was observed that an increase in the Peclet and Rayleigh numbers results in an enhancement of the thermal energy exchange rate. It was also concluded that a decrement on the Local Nusselt Number is tightly related with a decrease of the channel length, but the mentioned dimensionless number then became stable in the fully developed flow region and increased until it reached the end of the channel, presenting a positive linear trend.