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This paper aims to consider numerical analysis of laminar double-diffusive natural convection inside a non-homogeneous closed medium composed of a saturated porous matrix and a clear binary fluid under spatial sinusoidal heating/cooling on one side wall and uniform salting.

The domain of interest is a partially square porous enclosure with sinusoidal wall heating and cooling. The fluid flow, heat and mass transfer dimensionless governing equations associated with the corresponding boundary conditions are discretized using the finite volume method. The resulting algebraic equations are solved by an in-house FORTRAN code and the SIMPLE algorithm to handle the non-linear character of conservation equations. The validity of the in-house FORTRAN code is checked by comparing the current results with previously published experimental and numerical works. The effect of the porous layer thickness, the spatial frequency of heating and cooling, the Darcy number, the Rayleigh number and the porous to fluid thermal conductivity ratio is analyzed.

The results demonstrate that for high values of the spatial frequency of heating and cooling (f = 7), temperature contours show periodic variations with positive and negative values providing higher temperature gradient near the thermally active wall. In this case, the temperature variation is mainly in the porous layer, while the temperature of the clear fluid region is practically the same as that imposed on the left vertical wall. This aspect can have a beneficial impact on thermal insulation. Besides, the porous to fluid thermal conductivity ratio, Rk, has practically no effect on Shhot wall, contrary to Nuinterface where a strong increase is observed as Rk is increased from 0.1 to 100, and much heat transfer from the hot wall to the clear fluid via the porous media is obtained.

The findings are useful for devices working on double-diffusive natural convection inside non-homogenous cavities.

The authors believe that the presented results are original and have not been published elsewhere.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a numerical study of conjugate heat transfer by mixed convection and conduction in a lid-driven enclosure with thick vertical porous layer. The effect of the relevant parameters: Richardson number (Ri=0.1, 1, 10) and thermal conductivity ratio (Rk=0.1, 1, 10, 100) are investigated.

The studied system is a two dimensional lid-driven enclosure with thick vertical porous layer. The left vertical wall of the enclosure is allowed to move in its own plane at a constant velocity. The enclosure is heated from the right vertical wall isothermally. The left and the right vertical walls are isothermal but temperature of the outside of the right vertical wall is higher than that of the left vertical wall. Horizontal walls are insulated. The governing equations are solved by finite volume method and the SIMPLE algorithm.

From the finding results, it is observed that: for the two studied cases, heat transfer rate along the hot wall is a decreasing function of thermal conductivity ratio irrespective of Richardson numbers contrary to the heat transfer rate along the fluid-porous layer interface which is an increasing function of thermal conductivity ratio. At forced convection dominant regime, the difference between heat transfer rate for upward and downward moving wall is insensitive to the thermal conductivity ratio. For downward moving wall, average Nusselt number is higher than that of upward moving wall.

Some applications: building applications, furnace design, nuclear reactors, air solar collectors.

From the bibliographic work and the authors’ knowledge, the conjugate mixed convection in lid-driven partially porous enclosures has not yet been investigated which motivates the present work that represent a continuation of the preceding investigations.