CONJUGATE NATURAL-CONVECTION HEAT-TRANSFER BETWEEN 2 POROUS-MEDIA SEPARATED BY A VERTICAL WALL

The problem of coupled heat transfer by natural convection between two fluid-saturated porous media at different temperatures separated by a vertical conductive wall is investigated both analytically and numeri cally, taking account of the two-dimensional thermal conduction in the separating wall. The main parameters of the problem are epsilon, the ratio of thickness to height of the wall, which is small in our analys is, and a, a measure of the ratio of the thermal resistance of one of the boundary layers to the thermal resistance of the wall. Asymptotic solutions are obtained for large and small values of alpha and alpha/e psilon(2) and compared with numerical solutions obtained for finite va lues of these parameters. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.