Thermogravitational separation in horizontal annular porous cell

¹ Laboratoire de Mécanique, Matériaux et Energétique (L2ME), Université Abderrahmane Mira de Béjaia, Campus de Targa Ouzemour, 06000 Béjaia, Algérie
² Laboratoire d’Energétique, Mécanique et Ingénieries (LEMI), Université M’Hamad Bougara, 3500 Boumerdès, Algérie
³ IMFT, UMR CNRS/INP/UPS No. 5502, UFR MIG, Université Paul Sabatier, 118 route de Narbonne, 31062 Toulouse Cedex, France
⁴ PHASE, EA 810, UFR PCA, Université Paul Sabatier, 118 routes de Narbonne, 31062 Toulouse Cedex, France

^a Corresponding author: oussama.abahri@gmail.com

Received: 19 August 2015
Accepted: 26 November 2015

Abstract

Thermogravitational separation has until now, been used in different heated vertical cells called thermogravitational columns. The cell can be an annular cavity with two isothermal faces maintained at different temperatures. The main objective of this paper is to study the two dimensional coupled convection with thermodiffusion process. It concerns a theoretical and numerical investigation of species separation in a binary liquid mixture saturating a horizontal porous annulus space where the inner cylinder is heated isothermally. This kind of geometry is used instead of the annular vertical cell, hence the novelty of this technique. Analytical resolution is performed using the perturbation method function of time versus the corresponding physics (Raleigh and Lewis numbers...). Results reveal that the separation can be increased with an optimum for small values of Rayleigh number. Further, these values are less important than the critical value of Raleigh leading to the loss of unicellular flow stability found in literature.