Free convection along a vertical heated plate in a porous medium with anisotropic permeability (Q4700992)

The authors present a theoretical study of natural convection along a semi-infinite vertical plate embedded in a fluid-saturated porous medium. The plate is assumed isothermally or subject to a constant heat flux. The porous medium, modeled according to Darcy's law, is anisotropic in permeability with its principal axes oriented in a direction that is oblique to the gravity vector. The governing boundary-layer equations are solved by using a similarity transformation, and then by using an alternating direction implicit scheme. Temporal and spatial derivatives are approximated by first- and second-order discretization schemes along with a successive over relaxation method. The authors present comparisons between the similarity solution and numerical solution in a wide range of governing parameters. The effects of the anisotropic permeabilities' ratio, \(K^*\), of the orientation angle of the principal axes, \(\theta\), and of the Rayleigh number, Ra, on the flow and heat transfer are investigated in details. The main conclusions are: a) the convective flow along a vertical plate embedded in an anisotropic porous medium is considerably affected by both the permeabilities' ratio \(K^*\) and inclination angle \(\theta\) of the principal axes; b) when the orientation of the inclination angle is such that the principal axis with higher permeability is parallel to the plate, the strength of the convective flow is maximum. This occurs for \(K^*<1\) when \(\theta=0^0\), and for \(K^*>1\) when \(\theta =90^\circ\). In this situation the boundary-layer hypothesis is valid, provided that the permeability along the plate is not considerably greater than that in the direction normal to the plate; c) for a fixed inclination \(\theta\), the heat transfer is promoted (when compared with the isotropic equation \(K^*=1)\) as the permeability ratio \(K^*\) becomes larger than 1, and reduces when \(K^*\) becomes smaller than 1.