Analysis of Energy and Exergy for Mixed Convection Flow in Microstructure Filled Vented Enclosures

Understanding heat transfer through saturated porous media is of great importance to many engineering and geophysical systems such as cooling the electronic devices and solar power collectors, and post-accidental heat removal in nuclear reactors. Large numbers of research studies have been and are conducted on the expanding field of porous media due to the high rate of heat transfer in these systems. Despite the efforts made towards the study of the mechanics of fluid flow through porous media, little is studied the rate of exergy which is the only factor presenting the rate of reusable energy potentially produced by a heat generating body. The objective of this study is to develop a design of experiment to carry out a numerical analysis of heat transfer in a rectangular enclosure filled with a saturated porous medium. The optimum heat transfer rate will be obtained for various configuration-related parameters, namely different inlet to outlet ratios and different inlet width to cavity width ratios. These parameters will be optimized to achieve maximum rate of heat transfer and minimum rate of entropy generation. The results of this study will also help to determine relationships for predicting the heat transfer characteristics of the enclosure.