Analysis of free convection about a horizontal cylinder in a porous media using a thermal non-equilibrium model

The thermally non-equilibrium model is used to study the free convection from a horizontal cylinder immersed in porous media. The governing equations are transformed to dimensionless form by introducing the boundary layer dimensionless variables. The resultant parabolic system of differential equations is solved by using an implicit finite difference method based on Keller box algorithm. The results of the developed code are validated with different mesh sizes, which can be used as benchmark results for thermally equilibrium condition. Numerical results are obtained for non-equilibrium model to analyze the effect of the governing parameters, which are the heat transfer coefficient between the solid and fluid phases H and the porosity scaled thermal conductivity ratio Kr. The results show that increasing H or Kr leads to increase in the total average Nusselt number. The value of the average Nusselt number for both fluid and solid phases as well as the total average Nusselt number have approached the corresponding values of the thermally equilibrium model at high value of H × Kr.