Convective Heat Transfer Flow along a Sinusoidal Wavy Surface in a Porous Medium with Variable Permeability

Abstract

A numerical study on convective heat transfer flow along a sinusoidal wavy surface in a fluid saturated sparsely packed porous medium is undertaken by considering variable porosity, variable permeability and variable thermal conductivity. The Darcy model is used to describe the flow in porous medium. A coordinate transformation is used to incorporate the waviness in governing equations, and the resultant boundary layer equations are solved by employing Local Non-similarity method. The obtained numerical results for fluid flow characteristics and Nusselt number are presented graphically for different values of ratio of solid thermal conductivity and fluid conductivity, porosity at the edge of the boundary layer and amplitude of the wavy surface for two cases uniform permeability (UP) and variable permeability (VP).