Onset of Oscillatory and Stationary Double-Diffusive Convection Within a Tilted Porous Enclosure

Abstract

The present chapter is devoted to a numerical analysis of double-diffusive convection in porous media. A large cross section of fundamental research on double-diffusive convection has been reviewed by Nield and Bejan [5]. Numerical simulation of convective flows within porous media has considerably improved during the last three decades. Clearly, this is mainly due to the improvement in numerical techniques and high speed computers with large memory. In thermofluid or thermosolutal convection, the heat and/or mass transfer are driven by the buoyancy forces. Therefore, the transport equations that model the flows are strongly coupled to each other. The solution is thus usually obtained by simultaneously solving the governing equations. During the last three decades, the thermophysicists have used different methods and techniques to solve the coupled equations at different levels of complexity assuming certain approximations. The most common methods used in thermofluid are, to name but a few, the well known finite-difference method, the finite volume, the finite element, the spectral and the boundary element methods.