Heatline visualization of buoyancy-driven flow inside a nanofluid-saturated porous enclosure

In the present paper,the heatline visualization technique is utilized to understand heat transport path for buoyancy-driven flow inside a rectangular porous enclosure saturated with nanofluids. for this purpose,the mass,momentum and energy conservation equations are solved numerically adopting a control-volume based computational procedure. moreover,the dimensionless heat function equation is utilized to determine the heat flow pattern inside the enclosure. computations are undertaken for cu,al2o3,and tio2 nanoparticles in the base fluid of water and corresponding results in terms of dimensionless distributions of streamlines,isothermal lines,and heatlines as well as numerical values for flow strength and the average nusselt number are compared with those of pure water under different darcy-rayleigh numbers. additionally,the consequences of the nanoparticle fraction and the enclosure aspect ratio on the buoyancy-driven flow are analyzed. inspection of the presented results indicates that among cu-water,al2o3-water,and tio2-water nanofluids,the cu-water one produces higher heat transfer rates that is attributed to higher thermal conductivity of the cu nanoparticles. © 2015 jordan journal of mechanical and industrial engineering.