Combined Heat and Mass Transfer by Natural Convection in a Porous Medium

The chapter describes the combined heat and mass-transfer natural convection mechanisms, which are considered an important subfield in contemporary heat and mass-transfer research. This subfield essentially brings together the studies concerned with the combined heat and mass-transfer or double-diffusive processes that are driven by buoyancy through porous media saturated with fluid. The density gradients that provide the driving buoyancy effect are induced by the combined effects of temperature and species concentration nonuniformities present in the porous medium. The chapter considers the phenomena of convection through fluid-saturated porous media generally in terms of volume-averaged quantities. There are four conservation principles considered in the study of convection with more than one buoyancy effect. These include conservation of mass, energy, species, and momentum. Heat and mass transfer in the vertical direction and in horizontal direction are discussed in detail. Another category of studies of combined buoyancy effects in porous media deals with the local fields around buried sources of heat and mass. The recent work in this field focuses on the multilayer structure of flows of the boundary-layer or concentrated-source type.