Numerical Treatment of Convective Flow through Porous Media with Variable Permeability via Nonsimilarity Analysis

Abstract

This dissertation studies the boundary layer flow and heat transfer along a flat surface embedded in a porous medium with variable wall temperature and surface heat flux. A computational procedure based on the local non-similarity method has been established. The correctness of the numerical procedure has been confirmed via verifying some special cases found in the literature. Throughout this study the porous medium was modeled based on Darcy's and non-Darcy's law. A more generalized model has been proposed for further studies. A numerical solution of the resulting system of coupled non-linear differential equations for each problem has been obtained using the finite difference method. The velocity and temperature distribution as well as the heat transfer rate have been presented either graphically or in tabular form.