Unsteady flow and entropy analysis of nanofluids inside cubic porous container holding inserted body and wavy bottom wall

Natural convection in a cubical porous container has been controlled by allowing the bottom wall to be of wavy shape and by inserting a conducive square cylinder inside of it. This control process has been investigated transiently in this paper using an alumina-water nanofluid by implementing a numerical method based on the Galerkin weighted residual finite element method. The Darcy-Forchheimer model has been adopted. Isothermal conditions are imposed at the bottom wavy wall (cold) as well as at the vertical walls (hot). Five parameters have been altered to assess the controlling problems. These are the Darcy number, porosity, volume fraction of the nanoparticles, dimension of the central body and the number of undulations of the bottom surface. The results show that the Darcy number exhibits a larger influence on both the Nusselt number and the average temperature than the other parameters, such that when Da is raised from 10(-6) to 10(-2) the increase in the Nusselt number is about 30.7 at phi = 0.04, whereas the percentages of increase due to raising phi from 0 to 4% is about 11.7, 3.7 and 5.9 at Da = 10(-6), 10(-3) and 10(-2), respectively. It is also noticed that the entropy generation within the container is mainly due to the thermal irreversibility at lower values of the Darcy number and porosity, and at higher number of undulations and volume fraction of nanoparticles.

Automated summary

This study investigates the control of natural convection in a cubical porous container by altering the shape of the bottom wall and inserting a conducive square cylinder inside of it. The results show that the Darcy number has a significant influence on the Nusselt number and average temperature, while the entropy generation within the container is mainly affected by lower Darcy numbers and porosity, and higher number of undulations and volume fraction of nanoparticles.