NATURAL CONVECTION IN A POROUS LAYER BOUNDED BY IMPERVIOUS DOMAINS: FROM NUMERICAL APPROACHES TO EXPERIMENTAL REALIZATION

摘要

This work presents the results of a numerical and experimental study of free convection in a porous layer bounded by impervious domains subjected to a vertical temperature gradient. This configuration has been chosen as a reference for some geological structures. The main parameters of the experimental configuration are a slope of 15 deg, an aspect ratio of 10 for the porous layer and a thermal conductivity ratio(λ_p/λ_np) of 0.7. For that case, a good coherence is found concerning the flow patterns observed trough the different methods. In all results, an anti-clockwise unicellular flow (with a layer rising from left to right) is observed at low filtration Rayleigh numbers Ra.