Natural convection about a vertical plate embedded in a bidisperse porous medium (Q2427644)

The authors consider a 2D steady flow in a bidisperse porous medium (BDPM) induced by a vertical heated plate. The BDPM consists of clusters of small particles. The temperature of the plate is constant and the ambient temperature is given. The authors write the dimensionless balance equations for mass conservation, momentum and thermal energy. Darcy's law is used for the description of the link between the pressure and the velocity inside the BDPM. The authors introduce stream functions inside the two phases of the BDPM (macropores between the clusters and micropores within them). The main part of the paper consists to present an asymptotic analysis of the problem, for small values of \(x\), changing the unknowns and introducing power series in terms of this \(x\)-variable. The last part of the paper compares the results which are here obtained to results previously described in the literature. The authors indeed have here to compute four remaining parameters and they compute their values solving a system of ode's.