Laminar free convection up a vertical porous plate with suction

Abstract

Paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Mauritius, 11-13 July, 2011.A heated vertical plate generates a buoyant boundary layer that rises up its surface, growing in width as it rises. If suction is applied to the surface of the plate then at some height the buoyant layer ceases to grow and its width no longer varies in the vertical direction. Analytic expressions exist for this fully developed region based on the assumption of uniform suction. If however the suction is through holes that have a diameter or spacing that is significant with respect to the thickness of the thermal boundary layer, then the assumption of uniform suction is questionable. This paper uses CFD to model the flow for this case of non-negligible hole diameter and spacing, and presents results for how the heat transfer differs from the case of uniform suction.