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This paper aims to study the influence of significant design parameters of elephant trunk soft pneumatic actuator and presents maximum optimized geometric structure of the actuator using finite element method.

Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is used to examine the influence of significant parameters such as wall thickness, bottom layer thickness and gap between adjacent chambers on the performance of the soft actuator. The most influencing parameter is found to be the wall thickness compared to the gap between adjacent chambers and bottom layer thickness.

The optimization of bending moment recommends a wall thickness of 1.5 mm, a gap between the adjacent channels of 1.5 mm and bottom layer thickness of 4 mm for the actuator. The theoretical expression of mechanical parameters is described.

The design optimization of elephant trunk shaped soft actuator with respect to bending angle and force analysis has not been investigated.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of finite wall thickness on the natural convection and entropy generation in a square cavity filled with Al₂O₃–water nanofluid in the presence of bottom heat source.

The moving isothermal heater was placed on the bottom solid wall. The vertical walls (left and right walls) were fully maintained at low temperatures. The rest of the bottom solid wall along with the top horizontal wall was kept adiabatic. The boundaries of the domain are assumed to be impermeable; the fluid within the cavity is a water-based nanofluid having Al₂O₃ nanoparticles. The Boussinesq approximation is applicable. The dimensionless governing equations subject to the selected boundary conditions are solved using the finite difference method. The current proposed numerical method is proven excellent through comparisons with the existing experimental and numerical published studies.

Numerical results were demonstrated graphically in several forms including streamlines, isotherms and local entropy generation, as well as the local and average Nusselt numbers. The results reveal that the thermal conductivity and thickness of the solid wall are important control parameters for optimization of heat transfer and Bejan number within the partially heated square cavity.

According to the past research studies mentioned above and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the gap regarding the problem with entropy generation analysis and natural convection in partially heated square cavity has yet to be filled. Because of this, this study aims to investigate the entropy generation analysis as well as the natural convection in nanofluid-filled square cavity which was heated partially. A square cavity with an isothermal heater located on the bottom solid horizontal wall of the cavity and partly cold sidewalls are essential problems in thermal processing applications. Hence, the authors believe that this present work will be a valuable contribution in improving the thermal performance.

The purpose of this paper is to study the conjugate heat transfer via natural convection and conduction in a triangular enclosure filled with a porous medium.

Darcy flow model was used to write governing equations with Boussinesq approximation. The transformed governing equations are solved numerically using a finite difference technique. It is assumed that the enclosure consists of a conducting bottom wall of finite thickness, an adiabatic (insulated) vertical wall and a cooled inclined wall.

Flow patterns, temperature and heat transfer were presented at different dimensionless thickness of the bottom wall, h, from 0.05 to 0.3, different thermal conductivity ratio between solid material and fluid, k, from 0.44 to 283 and Rayleigh numbers, Ra, from 100 to 1000. It is found that both thermal conductivity ratio and thickness of the bottom wall can be used as control parameters for heat transport and flow field.

It is believed that this is the first paper on conduction‐natural convection in porous media filled triangular enclosures with thick wall. In the last years, most of the researchers focused on regular geometries such as rectangular or square cavity bounded by thick wall.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze numerically forced convective conjugate heat transfer characteristics for laminar flow through a wavy minichannel.

The mass and momentum conservation equations for the flow of water in the fluidic domain and the coupled energy conservation equations in both the fluid and solid domain are solved numerically using the finite element method. The exteriors of both the walls are subjected to a uniform heat flux.

The results reveal that the theoretical model without consideration of the effect of wall thickness always predicts a lower value of average Nusselt number ( Nu¯) as compared to the case of conjugate analysis, although it varies with the thickness as well as material of the wall. For the low amplitude of the wall (α = 0.2), the performance factor (PF) becomes very high for Re in the regime of 5 (⩽) Re (⩽) 15. For any geometrical configurations, conjugate heat transfer analysis predicts higher PF as compared to that of nonconjugate analysis.

The present study finds relevance in several applications, such as solar collectors and heat exchangers used in chemical industries and heating-ventilation and air-conditioning, etc.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the analysis of combined influences of the thickness and the material of the wall of the channel together with the geometrical parameters of the channel, namely, amplitude and wavelength on the heat transfer and fluid flow characteristics for flow through wavy minichannel in the laminar regime is reported first time in the literature.

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.

This paper aims to theoritically investigate the free convection flow and heat transfer of a non-Newtonian fluid with pseudoplastic behavior in a cylindrical vertical cavity partially filled with a layer of a porous medium.

The non-Newtonian behavior of the pseudoplastic liquid is described by using a power-law non-Newtonian model. There is a temperature difference between the internal and external cylinders. The porous layer is attached to the internal cylinder and has a thickness of D. Upper and lower walls of the cavity are well insulated. The governing equations are transformed into a non-dimensional form to generalize the solution. The finite element method is used to solve the governing equations numerically. The results are compared with the literature results in several cases and found in good agreement.

The influence of the thickness of the porous layer, Rayleigh number and non-Newtonian index on the heat transfer behavior of a non-Newtonian pseudoplastic fluid is addressed. The increase of pseudoplastic behavior and increase of the thickness of the porous layer enhances the heat transfer. By increase of the porous layer from 0.6 to 0.8, the average Nusselt number increased from 0.15 to 0.25. The increase of non-Newtonian effects (decrease of the non-Newtonian power-law index) enhances the heat transfer rate.

The free convection behavior of a pseudoplastic-non-Newtonian fluid in a cylindrical enclosure partially filled by a layer of a porous medium is addressed for the first time.

The purpose of this study is a numerical analysis of transient natural convection in a square partially porous cavity with a heat-generating and heat-conducting element using the local thermal non-equilibrium model under the effect of cooling from the vertical walls. It should be noted that this research deals with a development of passive cooling system for the electronic devices.

The domain of interest is a square cavity with a porous layer and a heat-generating element. The vertical walls of the cavity are kept at constant cooling temperature, while the horizontal walls are adiabatic. The heat-generating solid element is located on the bottom wall. A porous layer is placed under the clear fluid layer. The governing equations, formulated in dimensionless stream function, vorticity and temperature variables with corresponding initial and boundary conditions, are solved using implicit finite difference schemes of the second order accuracy. The governing parameters are the Darcy number, viscosity variation parameter, porous layer height and dimensionless time. The effects of varying these parameters on the average total Nusselt number along the heat source surface, the average temperature of the heater, the fluid flow rate inside the cavity and on the streamlines and isotherms are analyzed.

The results show that in the case of local thermal non-equilibrium the total average Nusselt number is an increasing function of the interphase heat transfer coefficient and the porous layer thickness, while the average heat source temperature decreases with the Darcy number and viscosity variation parameter.

An efficient numerical technique has been developed to solve this problem. The originality of this work is to analyze unsteady natural convection within a partially porous cavity using the local thermal non-equilibrium model in the presence of a local heat-generating solid element. The results would benefit scientists and engineers to become familiar with the analysis of convective heat transfer in enclosures with local heat-generating heaters and porous layers, and the way to predict the heat transfer rate in advanced technical systems, in industrial sectors including transportation, power generation, chemical sectors and electronics.

Nowadays, the most important challenge in mechanical engineering, power engineering and electronics is a development of effective cooling systems for heat-generating units. Taking into account this challenge, this study aims to deal with computational investigation of thermogravitational energy transport of pseudoplastic nanoliquid in an electronic chamber with a periodic thermally producing unit placed on the bottom heat-conducting wall of finite thickness under an influence of isothermal cooling from vertical side walls.

The control equations formulated using the Boussinesq approach, Ostwald–de Waele power law and single-phase nanofluid model with experimentally based correlations of Guo et al. for nanofluid dynamic viscosity and Jang and Choi for nanofluid thermal conductivity have been worked out by the in-house computational procedure using the finite difference technique. The impact of the Rayleigh number, nanoadditives concentration, frequency of the periodic heat generation from the local element and thickness of the bottom solid substrate on nanoliquid circulation and energy transport has been studied.

It has been found that a raise of the nanoadditives concentration intensifies the cooling of the heat-generating element, while a growth of the heat-generation frequency allows reducing the amplitude of the heater temperature.

Mathematical modeling of a pseudoplastic nanomaterial thermogravitational energy transport in an electronic cabinet with a periodic thermally generating unit, a heat-conducting substrate and isothermal cooling vertical surfaces to identify the possibility of intensifying heat removal from a heated surface.

The purpose of this paper is to present transient turbulent natural convection with surface thermal radiation in a square differentially heated enclosure using non-primitive variables like stream function and vorticity.

The governing equations formulated in dimensionless variables “stream function, vorticity and temperature,” within the Boussinesq approach taking into account the standard two equation k-ε turbulence model with physical boundary conditions have been solved using an iterative implicit finite-difference method.

It has been found that using of the presented algebraic transformation of the mesh allows to effectively conduct numerical analysis of turbulent natural convection with thermal surface radiation. It has been shown that the average convective Nusselt number increases with the Rayleigh number and decreases with the surface emissivity, while the average radiative Nusselt number is an increasing function of these key parameters. It has been shown that a presence of surface thermal radiation effect leads to an expansion of the eddy viscosity zones close to the walls.

It should be noted that for the first time in this paper we used stream function and vorticity variables with very effective algebraic transformation of the mesh in order to create a non-uniform mesh for an analysis of turbulent flow. Such method allows to reduce the computational time essentially in comparison with using of the primitive variables. The considered method has been successfully validated on the basis of the experimental and numerical data of other authors in case of turbulent natural convection without thermal radiation. The used numerical method would benefit scientists and engineers to become familiar with the analysis of turbulent convective heat and mass transfer, and the way to predict the properties of the turbulent flow in advanced nuclear systems, in industrial sectors including transportation, power generation, chemical sectors, ventilation, air-conditioning, etc.