Natural Convection in Annulus Between Two Concentric Cylinders Partially Filled with Metal Foam Distributed with New Suggested Design

The investigation of natural convection in an annular space between two concentric cylinders partially filled with metal foam is introduced numerically. The metal foam is inserted with a new suggested design that includes the distribution of metal foam in the annular space, not only in the redial direction, but also with the angular direction. Temperatures of inner and outer cylinders are maintained at constant value in which inner cylinder temperature is higher than the outer one. Naiver Stokes equation with Boussinesq approximation is used for fluid regime while Brinkman-Forchheimer Darcy model used for metal foam. In addition, the local thermal equilibrium condition in the energy equation of the porous media is presumed to be applicable for the present investigation. CFD ANSYS FLUENT software package (version 18.2) is used as a solver to this problem. Various parameters are examined; Rayleigh number, Darcy number, and thermal conductivity ratio to study the effect of them on fluid flow and heat transfer inside the annuli space in the suggested design of metal foam layer. current model is compared with the available published results and good agreement is noticed. Results showed that as Rayleigh number increases the dominated of convection mode increases and Nusselt increases. Also, Nusselt is larger at the higher Darcy and thermal conductivity ratio. It was found that at Rayleigh of 10⁶ and thermal conductivity ratio of 10⁴ Nusselt reach its higher value which is 6.69 for Darcy of 0.1 and 6.77 for Darcy of 0.001. A comparison between this design and the traditional design was established for Darcy 0.001 and thermal conductivity ratio 10², and its showed a good enhancement in Nusselt number and the greatest enhancement percentage was 44% at Rayleigh equal 5*10⁴ while the lowest percentage is 6% for Rayleigh equal10⁶.