Natural convection in a vertical strip immersed in a porous medium

Abstract

In this work, the conjugated heat transfer characteristics of a thin vertical strip of finite length, placed in a porous medium has been studied using numerical and asymptotic techniques. The nondimensional temperature distribution in the strip and the reduced Nusselt number at the top of the strip are obtained as a function of the thermal penetration parameter s, which measures the thermal region where the temperature of the strip decays to the ambient temperature of the surrounding fluid. The numerical values of this nondimensional parameter permits to classify the different physical regimes, showing different solutions: a thermally long behaviour, an intermediate transition and a short strip limit. (C) 2003 Editions scientifiques et medicales Elsevier SAS. All rights reserved.