Influence of variable heat flux on natural convection along a corrugated wall in porous media (Q2373524)

The authors study numerically the steady free convection from a wavy vertical wall under a power-law heat flux condition. Both Darcy and Forchheimer extended non-Darcy models are considered. The wavy wall is transformed to a flat surface by a simple transformation, and the resulting equations are transformed to boundary-layer equations under the assumption that the Rayleigh number \(Ra\) is large (\(Ra\gg 1\)). A finite difference scheme based on Keller-box approach has been used in conjunction with a block tri-diagonal solver for obtaining the solution of the corresponding boundary-layer equations. Detailed numerical simulations are carried out to investigate the effect of the governing parameters, such as power-law heat flux exponent \(m\), wavelength-amplitude ratio \(a\) and the modified Grashof number for the porous medium \(Gr'\). The heat transfer and fluid flow characteristics are studied using velocity, temperature, streamline and isotherm plots. It is shown that the results obtained for \(m=0\), which correspond to uniform heat flux condition along the sinusoidal heated surface, are in very good agreement with results from the literature. It is also shown that the wall temperature distribution has local minima near the crests and troughs of the heated surface. This occurs because of the fact that the heat is convected away from the surface at a faster rate near the crests and troughs of the wavy surface, since the component of the buoyancy force driving the flow has local maxima at crest and trough positions.