MHD Natural Convective Flow in an Isosceles Triangular Cavity Filled with Porous Medium due to Uniform/Non-Uniform Heated Side Walls

Abstract

Abstract In this article, numerical simulations are carried out for fluid flow and heat transfer through natural convection in an isosceles triangular cavity under the effects of uniform magnetic field. The cavity is of cold bottom wall and uniformly/non-uniformly heated side walls and is filled with isotropic porous medium. The governing Navier Stoke's equations are subjected to Penalty finite element method to eliminate pressure term and Galerkin weighted residual method is applied to obtain the solution of the reduced equations for different ranges of the physical parameters. The results are verified as grid independent and comparison is made as a limiting case with the results available in literature, and it is shown that the developed code is highly accurate. Computations are presented in terms of streamlines, isotherms, local Nusselt number and average Nusselt number through graphs and tables. It is observed that, for the case of uniform heating side walls, strength of circulation of streamlines gets increased when Rayleigh number is increased above critical value, but increase in Hartmann number decreases strength of streamlines circulations. For non-uniform heating case, it is noticed that heat transfer rate is maximum at corners of bottom wall.