Transport phenomena projects: Natural convection between porous, concentric cylinders. A method to learn and to innovate

A project that involves the numerical simulation of transport phenomena is an excellent method to teach this subject to senior/graduate chemical engineering students. The subject presented here has been used in our senior/graduate course, it concerns the study of natural convection heat transfer between two concentric, horizontal, saturated porous cylinders. The different stages involved to successfully solve this project are the writing of appropriate conservation equations and boundary conditions, the choice of scaling parameters to render the equations dimensionless, the writing of a numerical code to solve these equations and finally the interpretation of the obtained results. Upon completion, the student should have a good working knowledge of natural convection heat transfer, vector analysis, and CFD.