Natural convection in a partially porous cavity: Roads to chaos

Abstract

A numerical study of a periodic and chaotic behavior of natural convection in a square cavity, with a porous layer is presented. The cavity under study consists of two opposite vertical walls of which the lower half walls are hot (hold high temperature) and the upper half walls are cold (hold low temperature), whereas the horizontal walls are adiabatic. The porous medium is located in the lower part of the cavity. The natural heat transfer and the Darcy Brinkman equations are solved by using the finite volume method and the TDMA. The results show that thermal natural convection evolves towards a deterministic chaos by following Curry York scenario.