Asia Pacific Journal of Engineering Science and Technology 1 (1) (2015) 25-33

Asia Pacific Journal of Engineering Science and Technology

journal homepage: www.apjest.com

Full length article

Numerical study of natural convection in horizontal concentric cylinders with

porous material
Seetu Rana*
F.G.M. Govt. College, Adampur, Hisar-125052, India
(Received: 26 December 2015; accepted 29 December 2015; published online 30 December 2015)

ABSTRACT
In this paper, the main goal is to study of the effect of porous material in the annulus
between two horizontal isothermal concentric cylinders. Higher order semi compact scheme is
used to solve the governing equations. The Darcy-Brinkman model is considered to study the
effect of porous material.
Keywords: Natural convection; concentric horizontal cylinders; porous material; HOSC

1. Introduction
The research work, in the area of convective heat transfer has substantially increased
during recent years due to its wide applications in engineering and science. Natural convection
was first studied by Beckmann [1], who considered an annular cavity between concentric
isothermal cylinders in the horizontal position filled with air, hydrogen and carbon dioxide to
analyze the influence on the overall heat-transfer coefficients. A similar investigation using air
was made concurrently by Voigt and Krischer [23]. Kraussold [14] extended these results for the
larger prandle numbers taking water, transformer oil and machine oil. The local heat-transfer
coefficients in an annular geometry with air were first determined by Eckert and Soehngen [9].
An experimental investigation of horizontal annuli for different radius ratios and fluids was
performed by Liu et al. [17]. Grigull and Hauf [11] used thermal interferometry to visualize the
temperature and flow fields in air-filled horizontal circular annuli. Photographs of flow patterns
in air using smoke have been presented by Bishop and Carley [3] and Bishop et al. [4].
Koshmarov and Ivanov [15] obtained overall heat-transfer data for Grashof numbers between
10
*

and 105 , including results in the rarefied gas regime.

E-mail address: seetuduhan23@gmail.com

2015 Author(s)

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Asia Pacific J. Eng. Sci. Tech. 1 (1) (2015) 25-33

Kuehn and Goldstein [16] carried out experimental as well as computational investigation
for natural convection flow in horizontal annuli for L Di 0.8 and for Rayleigh number in the
range 102 to 105 . Bejan and Tien [2], analytically studied the natural convection between
isothermal horizontal concentric cylinders with different end temperatures. Date [8] numerically
predicted natural convection heat transfer in a horizontal annulus for L Di 0.8 and 0.15. The
numerical solution for natural convection between horizontal concentric cylinders was obtained
by Crawford and Lemlich [7] using a Gauss-Seidel iterative approach.
The flow through porous media is very important as these types of flows exit in nature.
Such types of flows are used in various fields such as in the fields of agriculture engineering to
study the underground water resources, seepage of water in river beds and in petroleum
technology. Inaba et al. [12] studied the natural convection heat transfer in an inclined
rectangular cavity filled with liquid and spherical particles, in which two opposing isothermal
walls are kept at different temperatures and other walls are thermally insulated experimentally
and a correlation equations was determined for some ranges of the modified Rayleigh number.
Burns and Stewart [5] investigated the effects of a permeable outer boundary on the maximum
temperature and the convective flows in a two-dimensional horizontal annulus containing a
uniformly heat generating porous media. They have solved the time-dependent governing
equations and obtained an explicit finite difference numerical form.
Burns and Stewart [6] extended their work to study the effects of a permeable inner
boundary on the maximum temperature and the convective flows numerically for a two
dimensional horizontal annulus containing a uniformly heat generating porous media. The heat
transfer rate from an isothermal vertical plate placed next to saturated high permeability porous
media is studied by Kaviany and Mittal [13]. The media used by them is polyurethane foams
saturated with air. Fand et al. [10] performed an experiment for the investigation of heat transfer
by natural convection from a horizontal cylinder embedded in porous media consisting of
randomly packed glass spheres saturated by either water or silicone oil. The rate of heat transfer
occurring in a fluid saturated porous media contained in a short cylinder is experimentally
studied by Stewart and Smith [21]. Scurtu et al. [20] made theoretical analysis of the steady free
convection in a saturated porous medium confined between two horizontal concentric cylinders.
Sanyasiraju and Manjula [18] developed a Higher Order Semi Compact (HOSC) finite difference
scheme to solve the unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in stream functions and
vorticity formulations. They have found that the solutions obtained with the HOSC scheme gives
good agreement with the analytical results available in the literature. They have also tested the
capability of HOSC scheme in capturing the very complex flow phenomenon of unsteady flow
past a rotating and translating circular cylinder [19].
In the present paper, the HOSC scheme is applied to study the effect of porous material in
the annulus between two horizontal isothermal concentric cylinders. To the study the effect of
porous material, Darcy-Brinkman model is used. The paper structured as follows; In Section 2,
the basic equations for the physical problem are given. The numerical methods are introduced in

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Asia Pacific J. Eng. Sci. Tech. 1 (1) (2015) 25-33

Section 3. The numerical results are presented Section 4 and a concluding discussion is given in
Section 5.
2. Mathematical formulation of the problem
Our system of interest consist two horizontal isothermal cylinders, a heated cylinder of
radius Ri and temperature Ti is placed inside another cylinder of radius Ro and temperature To as
shown in Fig. 1. The annular cavity is filled with the porous material of porosity . Inner
cylinder has been taken hot and the outer has been taken cold, due to temperature difference,
natural convection occurs. The cylinders have been considered to be long enough and the flow is
also assumed to be invariant along the axis of the cylinders, which leads to a two-dimensional
flow and two dimensional temperature distributions. The fluid is assumed to be viscous and
incompressible, the frictional heating is negligible. The Boussinesq approximation is used for the
fluid properties assuming the variation of density with temperature and other fluid properties are
constant. With the above assumptions, the two-dimensional time dependent non-dimensionalize
governing equations for the natural convection in porous medium in the Cartesian coordinates
according to the Darcy-Brinkman model are given by

TO

Ti
Fig. 1. Natural convection in the annulus bounded by isothermal horizontal cylinders with porous material.

u v

0,
x y

(1)

1 u 1 u
u
p 2u 2u 1

u v 2 2
u,
t 2 x
y
x x y Da

(2)

1 v 1 v
v
p 2v 2v 1
2 u v 2 2
v Gr T To ,
t x
y
y x y Da

(3)

T
T
T 1 2T 2T
u
v

t
x
y Pr x 2 y 2

(4)

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Asia Pacific J. Eng. Sci. Tech. 1 (1) (2015) 25-33

where u, v are velocity components along x and y directions , T denotes the temperature, Da
represents the Darcy number , Pr represents Prandtl number which can be defined as Pr

where and are thermal diffusivity and coefficient of kinematic viscosity respectively. Gr
T T
given by Gr g L3 i 2 o where g , and L are gravitational acceleration, coefficient of thermal

expansion and annulus width respectively. The temperature T in these equations is nonT To
dimensionalized using
, where T is the dimensional temperature. The stream function
Ti To

( x, y, t ) and vorticity ( x, y, t ) has been defined as

u

v u
,v
, .
y
x
x y

(5)

Using the above relations, the stream function-vorticity form of the equation can be written as
2 2

,
x 2 y 2

(6)

2w 2w
1

T
u
v

,
2 2 Gr

t x
y
y
x Da
x

(7)

T
T
T 1 2T 2T
u
v

.
t
x
y Pr x 2 y 2

(8)

The Cartesian coordinate system ( x, y ) has been transformed into the curvilinear system ( , )
using body fitted coordinate system proposed by Thomson et al. [23], which satisfy the Laplace
equations

xx yy 0, xx yy 0,

(9)

with the help of transformation Eq. (9), Eqs. (5) (8) take the new form
u

1 x x

1 y y

,v
,
J

1 2
2
2
2

,
J 2 2

2

(10)

(11)

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Asia Pacific J. Eng. Sci. Tech. 1 (1) (2015) 25-33

1 2
2
2

t
J J 2 2

2

Gr y T y T

J Da
T
1 T T
1 2T
2T
2T

t
J Pr J 2 2

2

(12)

(13)

where
2

x y
, =

2

x y
, J=

x x y y


,

x y x y


,

since , , and J depend on geometry therefore these quantities have been calculated only
once for whole process. Then Eqs. (11), (12), (13) have been solved in the computational domain
( , ) [0,1] [0,1]
with the initial and conditions
T 0 at t 0
and the boundary conditions
0,
on 0 and 1,
T 1,
on 0,
on 1.
T 0,
3. Method of solution
A fourth order approximation of the first and second order derivatives as defined in [18,
19] has been given by

h2

h2

D 1 D 2 o h 2 ,
D 1 D 2 o h 4 ,

2
h2 2
2
h2 2
2
2
2
D 1 D o h ,
D 1 D o h 4 ,
2
2

12

12

where h is the constant step length in , directions and

D f ,

f h, f h,
f , h f , h
, D f ,
,
2h
2h

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D2 f ,

Asia Pacific J. Eng. Sci. Tech. 1 (1) (2015) 25-33

f h, 2 f , f h,
h

, D2 f ,

f , h 2 f , f , h
h2

4. Numerical results and discussions

In this section, the effect of porous material on the natural convection in the annulus
between two horizontal isothermal concentric cylinders has been studied. The porous material
has been taken of porosity and to study the effect of porous media, the Darcy-Brinkman model
has been taken into the account. The numerical solutions have been obtained for Ra 5 104 ,
Pr 0.7 , L Di 0.8 , where L represents the annulus gap width while Di denotes the diameter
of the inner cylinder. The radius of the inner cylinder and outer cylinder has been taken 0.7 and
1.82. The non-dimensionalized temperatures of inner heated cylinder and outer cold cylinder are
constant and taken as Ti 1 and To 0 , respectively. The time increment has been taken

t 0.00001 . First of all, a comparative analysis for viscous medium has been made between
the present results and the numerical results obtained by Kuehn and Goldstein [16].

Fig. 2. Comparison of Kuehn & Goldstein and present numerical local equivalent conductivity.

The present local equivalent thermal conductivity k eq along the inner and outer cylinders
has been compared with the numerical results of Kuehn and Goldstein [16] as shown in Fig. 2.
The straight lines represent the present results and dotted lines represent the results for Kuehn
and Goldstein. The comparison has been obtained in good agreement. Another comparison has
been made for the radial dimensionless temperature profile as shown in Fig. 3. A good
agreement has been obtained between present numerical and numerical results obtained by
Kuehn and Goldstein [16].

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Asia Pacific J. Eng. Sci. Tech. 1 (1) (2015) 25-33

Fig. 3. Comparison of Kuehn & Goldstein and present numerical dimensionless temperature profiles.

(a)

Fig. 4. Streamlines and isotherms pattern (a) Viscous medium

(b)

(b) Porous medium ( 0.4, Da 0.001 .

The stream functions and isotherms patterns obtained for the porous media ( 0.4, Da 103 )
have been compared with those obtained for viscous media in Fig. 4 for Ra 5 104 . It has been
observed that the centre of the circulation of streamlines in porous media moves downward as
compared with viscous media for the same value of Rayleigh number. The isotherm patterns
obtained for viscous media is closure to the outer cylinder in comparison with porous media for
the same values of other parameters. The stream functions and isotherms patterns obtained for
the porous media for different Darcy number is shown in Fig. 5. The effect of medium porosity
on the equivalent thermal conductivity of inner and outer cylinders has been studied in the Fig. 6.
In case of inner cylinder, the equivalent thermal conductivity decreases at 1800 as porosity of the
medium increases while the equivalent thermal conductivity of the outer cylinder decreases at 00 .

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Asia Pacific J. Eng. Sci. Tech. 1 (1) (2015) 25-33

Fig. 5. Streamlines and isotherms patterns for (a) Da 0.1 (b) Da 0.01.

Fig. 6. Comparison of equivalent thermal conductivity for Ra 5 10 , L / Di 0.8 , Pr .7 and for different
4

porousities i.e. 0.2 , 0.4 , 0.6 and 0.8 .

5. Conclusions
The natural convection between the annulus between the horizontal concentric isothermal
cylinders with porous material has been studied. Darcy-Brinkman model has been applied for the
investigation. It is found that the heat transfer of the inner cylinder is maximum at the bottom
region and the heat transfer of the outer cylinder is maximum at the top region. The equivalent
thermal conductivity of inner cylinder decreases at 1800 as porosity of the medium increases
while the equivalent thermal conductivity of the outer cylinder decreases at 0 0 .
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W. Beckmann, Die Wrmebertragung in zylindrischen gasschichten bei natrlicher konvektion, Forsh. auf
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S. Rana

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