Magneto-convective flow through a porous enclosure with Hall current and Thermal radiation effects : numerical study

This paper reports the numerical study of magnetohydrodynamic radiative-convective flow in a square cavity containing a porous medium with Hall currents. This study is relevant to hydromagnetic fuel cell design and thermofluidic dynamics of complex magnetic liquid fabrication in enclosures. The governing equations of this fluid system are solved by a finitedifference vorticity stream function approach executed in MATLAB software. A detailed parametric investigation of the impact of Rayleigh number (thermal buoyancy parameter), Hartman number (magnetic body force parameter), Darcy number (permeability parameter), Hall parameter and radiation parameter on the streamline, temperature contours, local Nusselt number along the hot wall and mid-section velocity profiles is computed. Validation with previous special cases in the literature is included. Hall current and radiative effects are found to significantly modify thermofluidic characteristics. From the numerical results, it is found that the magnetic field suppresses the natural convection only for small buoyancy ratios. But, for larger buoyancy ratio, the magnetic field is effective in suppressing the thermal convective flow