Heat transfer analysis of a ventilated room with a porous partition: LB-MRT simulations

Abstract

This article presents the hydrodynamic and thermal characteristics of transfers by forced, mixed and natural convection in a room ventilated by air displacement. The main objective is to study the effect of a porous partition on the heat transfer and therefore the thermal comfort in the room. The fluid flow future in the cavity and the heat transfer rate on the active wall have been analyzed for different permeabilities: 10−6 ≤ Da ≤ 10. The other control parameters are obviously, the Rayleigh number and the Reynolds number varied in the rows: 10 ≤ Ra ≤ 106 and 50 ≤ Re ≤ 500 respectively. The transfer equations write were solved by the Lattice Boltzmann Multiple Relaxation Time method. For flow in porous media an additional term is added in the standard LB equations, to consider the effect of the porous media, based on the generalized model, the Brinkman-Forchheimer-extended Darcy model. The most important conclusion is that the Darcian regime start for small Darcy number Da < 10−4. Spatial competition between natural convection cell and forced convection movement is observed as Ra and Re rise. The effect of Darcy number values and the height of the porous layer is barely visible with a maximum deviation less than 7% over the ranges considered. Note that the natural convection regime is never reached for low Reynolds numbers. For this Re values the cooperating natural convection only improves transfers by around 10% while, for the other Reynolds numbers the improvement in transfers due to natural and forced convections cooperation is more significant.