Thermal Convection Around a Heat Source Embedded in a Box Containing a Saturated Porous Medium

A study of the thermal convection around a uniform flux cylinder embedded in a box containing a saturated porous medium is carried out experimentally and theoretically. The experimental work includes heat transfer and temperature field measurements. It is observed that for low Rayleigh numbers, the flow is two dimensional and time independent. Once a critical Rayleigh number is exceeded, the flow undergoes a Hopf bifurcation and becomes three dimensional and time dependent. The theoretical study involves the numerical solution of the two-dimensional Darcy–Oberbeck–Boussinesq equations. The complicated geometry is conveniently handled by mapping the physical domain onto a rectangle via the use of boundary-fitted coordinates. The numerical code can easily be extended to handle diverse geometric configurations. For low Rayleigh numbers, the theoretical results agree favorably with the experimental observations. However, the appearance of three-dimensional flow phenomena limits the range of utility of the numerical code.