Nonequilibrium natural convection in a differentially heated cavity filled with a saturated porous matrix

Steady-state natural convection in an enclosure filled with a saturated porous medium is investigated numerically. Brinkman-Forchheimer's extension of Darcy flow with a nonequilibrium model is used in the analysis. The paper intends to address the validity of the equilibrium model for natural convection. The predicted results indicated that the equilibrium model is difficult to justify for non-Darcy regime and when the solid thermal conductivity is higher than the fluid thermal conductivity. The maximum differences in the temperatures between the two phases take place at the bottom-left corner and due to skew-symmetry of the problem at the upper-right corner.