STUDY OF DOUBLE-DIFFUSIVE CONVECTION IN LAYERED ANISOTROPIC POROUS-MEDIA

Natural convection induced by combined heat and mass transfer in an enclosure filled with two layers of anisotropic porous media saturated with a two-component fluid is investigated by means of numerical experiments. Darcy's law together with the energy and specie equations are solved by a domain decomposition and a pseudo-spectral method using Chebyshev polynomials as the basis function. The interactions between the subdomains along the interface are decoupled by a superposition of elementary solutions. Four cases including aiding, opposing, cross diffusion with stabilizing, and destabilizing concentration fields are considered. The results show remarkable differences among the flow, temperature, and concentration fields. Depending on the orientation of the boundary conditions of the temperature and concentration fields, the overall heat transfer rates may or may not be sensitive to the Rayleigh numbers.