Using the porous medium to improve the forced convective heat transfer in the channel and its numerical analysis with lattice Boltzmann method

In this paper, numerical analysis of flow and heat transfer in a two-dimensional channel with porous medium and based on the lattice Boltzmann method is performed. The main reason for placing the porous medium inside the channel is to reduce the effective cross section of the channel and increase the localized mean velocity to increase the rate of heat transfer and control the maximum temperature of the hot plate. Also, due to passage of a part of the flow from inside of the porous medium, a sudden drop in pressure is prevented by reducing the cross-section. For this purpose, a porous medium with a random structure is considered in the upper part of the channel. The results include the effects of effective parameters such as Reynolds numbers, Prandtl number, aspect ratio and porosity of the porous medium on the maximum temperature, average Nusselt number and pressure drop. Results show that increase of the porosity increases the difference between the maximum temperature of simple channel and channel with porous medium. It is also observed that the use of a porous medium in the low Reynolds numbers creates a higher decrease in the hot plate temperature. In addition, increasing the Prandtl number initially increases the maximum temperature of the hot plate and its further increase will reduce the maximum temperature.