Natural convection in superposed fluid-porous layers (Q357131)

The study of flow and heat transfer through a porous medium is of relevance in many practical fields, such as petroleum technology, geophysical and agriculture engineering etc. Some of the direct examples are drying processes, powder metallurgy, transpiration cooling, insulation of buildings and pipes, chemical catalytic reactors, geothermal energy, fiber and granular insulations, design of packed bed reactor, underground disposal of nuclear waste materials and many others. ``Although buoyant convection in porous media was first studied about 40 years ago, there has lately been renewed interest in this topic owing to its importance in environmental and energy management problems in current scientific and geo-political context'' (from the authors' preface). This work presents a careful and detailed introduction to the modern theory of natural convection in superposed fluid-porous layers. Precise results in this area involve an exciting mixture of fluid mechanics, physics, chemistry, analytical and related numerical methods. Important attention is paid to the development of advanced computational techniques such as the Cholesky factorization, an invaluable tool for studying flow and transport in porous media. The book consists of a preface, 6 chapters, symbols and a list of references. The description of these chapters is, in short, as follows: Chapter 1 ``Introduction'' describes the scope of the book with some backgrounds, previous developments in the theory of flow through porous media. Here, the authors also present an idealized porous medium consisting of spherical particles saturated with a single fluid in an irregular geometry typical of real porous media. Chapter 2 ``Literature review'' gives the current status of research on porous media. In particular, the authors review the onset of convection for an initially motionless state in a two-dimensional cavity. Chapter 3 ``Mathematical formulation and numerical solution'' describes the governing equations of natural convection in two-dimensional fluid-saturated porous layers. In particular, boundary conditions at the interface of the fluid and porous layers are discussed in detail. The one-domain formulation presents a unified set of governing equations for the entire composite domain. The verification of the numerical schemes is performed for a randomly packed layer of glass beads saturated with water. The authors also examine here the Rayleigh-Bénard problem, the Horton-Rogers-Lapwood problem, the Elder problem, and the problem of uniformly heated fluid-superposed porous layer. Chapter 4 ``Numerical prediction of convection'' describes the effects of parameters that determine the heat transfer in a superposed fluid-porous layer system (the effect of heater size, the effect of porous sub-layer height, the porous structure effect, the effect of aspect ratio, the effect of conductivity ratio, Prandtl number effect and the effect of evolution of temperature fields). Flow and temperature fields are determined computationally for two-dimensional laminar flows at Rayleigh numbers up to \(10^6\). It is found that the presence of a localized heat source does not affect the mode of convective motion, but provides a different trigger for the onset of convection. Chapter 5 ``Measurement of heat transfer coefficients'' describes measurements of steady-state Nusselt numbers in superposed fluid-porous layers with \(\eta<1\) and \(\delta<1\). Here \(\eta\) is the ratio of porous layer height to total height, and \(\delta\) is the heated-to-base length ratio parameter. It is shown that these measurements provide entirely new data for \(\eta\) and \(\delta\). Chapter 6 ``Discussion'' compares numerical and experimental results for various models. The authors state that a special care must be taken while numerically implementing the one-domain formulation. In particular, the discretized equations for interfacial control volumes must be treated separately to perform correctly the Heaviside step functions. In the reviewer's opinion, this book provides a fundamental and comprehensive presentation of mathematical and physical theories of flow and transport in porous media, pointing out important practical applications. The book is excellently written and readable. The numerical solutions of the considered problems are given graphically and in tabular form. A large list of papers and books is included at the end. The book will be extremely useful to specialists working in the area of porous media and to researchers interested in the mathematical theory of flows in porous media.