Enhancing the heat-transfer rate by inhomogeneous porous boundary in turbulent convection

This study investigates the heat-flux enhancement of convection flows inside a fluid layer bounded from the top and bottom by two inhomogeneous porous layers. The porous matrix is made of solid materials with very high diffusivity. The numerical results reveal that, compared with the traditional convection system, the heat flux is greatly increased when the thickness of porous layer is large enough. At small Rayleigh numbers, the enhancement is the result of the increase in effective diffusivity in the fluid-saturated porous layers and the reduction in flow friction at the porous interface. For large Rayleigh numbers, the permeable motions across the interfaces generate strong convective flux, which greatly increases the total heat flux. For the latter parameter range, the exponent of the power-law scaling between the Nusselt number and the Rayleigh number exceeds 1/2, which is the value of the ultimate scaling. Our findings are not only of great potential in heat management in various industrial applications but also imply that, in many natural systems with imperfect boundaries, the global heat flux may be much stronger than the prediction by using a convection system with perfect boundaries.