Theoretical and Numerical Study of Thermosolutal Convection in a Cylindrical Porous Cavity Filled with a Nanofluid and Taking into Account Soret and Dufour Effects

In this article, a theoretical and numerical study of the phenomena of combined heat and mass transfer (thermosolutal), in a porous, isotropic, and saturated media filled with a nanofluid (aluminum nanoparticles) in thermal equilibrium with a binary base fluid within a cylindrical enclosure is presented. The sidewalls of the enclosure are rigid, impermeable, and adiabatic while the horizontal walls are kept at uniform temperature and concentration. The extended Darcy law of Brinkman-Forchheimer using the Boussinesq approximation describes the nanofluid flow in the porous layers. The finite volume method has been used to discretize the equations describing the phenomenon, namely the momentum, the energy, and the concentration equations. The effect of varying the number of Rayleigh, the number of Soret, the number of Dufour, the number of Prandtl, the Buoyancy ratio, the geometric aspect ratio, and the volume fraction of nanoparticles on heat and mass transfer has been studied.