Natural Convection Heat Transfer and Entropy Generation in a Porous Trapezoidal Enclosure Saturated with Power-Law Non-Newtonian Fluids

Abstract

In the present study, natural convection heat transfer and its associated entropy generation in a porous trapezoidal enclosure saturated with a power-law non-Newtonian fluid has been numerically investigated. Horizontal walls of the enclosure are assumed to be adiabatic while the side walls are considered to be kept at a constant temperature. A continuum-based approach is adapted here to model the fluid flow through porous media and the Darcy’s law is modified to account for non-Newtonian rheological behavior of the fluid. The obtained governing equations are discretized using the finite volume method and a detailed parametric study is undertaken to account for the effects of various relevant parameters of the problem on the heat transfer and entropy generation rates. It was shown that the impact of the power-law index on both entropy generation and heat transfer significantly intensifies in a convection-dominated flow regime inside the enclosure, especially for a shear thinning liquid. Moreover, heat transfer rate and entropy generation increase as the sidewall angle is elevated.

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Notes on contributors

Kaveh Yazdani

Mohammad Sahebjamei is a research assistant at Niroo-Research Institute, Tehran, Iran. He received his MSc in mechanical engineering-Thermo-Fluids from Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic) in 2018. His main research interests are turbulent combustion, turbulent flows, transvers jet flow fields, heat transfer enhancement, and non-Newtonian fluids.

Mohammad Sahebjamei

Ali Ahmadpour is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the Amirkabir University of Technology. He received his PhD from University of Tehran in 2015. His research interests are fluid dynamics and heat transfer of complex fluids. He has published several articles on these subjects especially in the field of restart flows for gelled pipelines.

Ali Ahmadpour

Kaveh Yazdani is a graduate student at Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. In 2015, he received his BSc in mechanical engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology. His main research interests are combustion, multiphase modeling, and porous media.