NATURAL CONVECTION BOUNDARY LAYER ALONG IMPERMEABLE INCLINED SURFACES EMBEDDED IN POROUS MEDIUM

摘要

Convection heat transfer in a saturated porousmedium is in great attention for many applications in geo-physics and energy systems. Applications such as geo-thermal energy utilization, ground water pollution analysis,insulation of buildings, paper production and petroleumreservoir can be cited. These applications have been widelydiscussed in recent books by Nield and Bejan [1], Inghamand Pop [2], Vafai [3], Pop and Ingham [4] and Ingham etal. [5]. However, natural convection along inclined plateshas received less attention than the cases of vertical andhorizontal plates. Rees and Riley [6], and Ingham et al. [7]presented some solution for free convection along a flatplate in a porous medium which are only valid at smallangles to the horizon. Jang and Chang [8] studied free con-vection on an inclined plate with power function distribu-tion of wall temperature, while its angle varies between 0to close to 90 degrees from horizontal. While Pop and Na[9] have solved the free convection of an isothermal in-clined surface. Their solution included all horizontal tovertical cases. Hossain and Pop [10] studied the effect ofradiation. Conjugate convection from a slightly inclinedplate was studied analytically and numerically by Vaszi etal. [11]. Lesnic et al. [12] studied analytically and numeri-cally the case of a thermal boundary condition of mixedtype on a nearly horizontal surface.