Natural convection on a vertical cylinder embedded in a thermally stratified high-porosity medium

Abstract

The laminar natural convection boundary layer flow on an isothermal vertical thin cylinder embedded in a thermally stratified high porosity medium has been studied. The non-Darcy effects including convective, boundary and inertial effects are included in this analysis. The non-linear coupled partial differential equations governing the flow are solved by using an implicit finite-difference scheme. For small and moderate values of the axial distance, these equations are also solved by a perturbation technique in combination with the Shanks transformation. It is observed that for certain values of the ambient stratification parameter, the skin friction vanishes and the direction of the heat transfer changes. The skin friction and heat transfer decrease with increasing ambient stratification, curvature and inertia parameters, but they increase with the permeability parameter.