Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2015) 130: 107
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2015-15107-4

Regular Article

Natural convection in a horizontal cylindrical annulus filled with a porous medium saturated by a nanofluid using Tiwari and Das’ nanofluid model

¹ Department of Theoretical Mechanics, Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, Tomsk State University, 634050, Tomsk, Russia
² Institute of Power Engineering, Tomsk Polytechnic University, 634050, Tomsk, Russia
³ Department of Applied Mathematics, Babeş-Bolyai University, 400084, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

^* e-mail: popm.ioan@yahoo.co.uk

Received: 8 November 2014
Accepted: 2 May 2015
Published online: 10 June 2015

Abstract

This paper deals with a numerical study of natural convection flow and heat transfer inside a concentric horizontal annulus filled with a porous medium saturated by a cuprum (Cu)-water nanofluid. The inner and outer cylinders are kept at different constant temperatures. First, the governing partial differential equations in dimensional formulation in a polar coordinate system for the physical domain are transformed in dimensionless form in terms of stream function-temperature formulation. These equations along with the corresponding boundary conditions were solved numerically by the finite difference method. Particular efforts have been focused on the effects of the Rayleigh number, porosity of the porous medium, solid volume fraction parameter of nanoparticles, annulus radius ratio, and the solid matrix of the porous medium (glass balls and aluminum foam) on the local and average Nusselt numbers, streamlines and isotherms. It is found that a very good agreement exists between the present results and those from the open literature.