Experimental Study of Free Convection from a Vertical Flat Plate in Porous Media

A set of experiments is done to study the phenomenon of free convection heat transfer from an isothermal vertical flat plate embedded in a saturated porous medium in steady state condition. The porous medium consisting of 0.8 cm spheres. The aspect ratio of the isothermal flat plate, H/W, is equal to 2. Where H is the height and W is the width of the vertical plate. The investigations were cared out for Darcy modified Rayleigh number between 100 and 500. The results indicate that heat transfer increases linearly with increasing the Darcy modified Rayleigh number. In addition, the present results are in good agreement with the higher-order boundary layer theory obtained by Cheng and Hsu [1].