Natural convection cooling process from two identical porous-covering electronic components

In the present work, we focus to study numerically the natural convection cooling process from two identical electronic components located on the bottom wall of a two-dimensional cavity. Each electronic component is covered by a porous medium with finite thickness. The conservation equations governing the problem are discretized using the finite volume method and the SIMPLER algorithm is used to handle the nonlinear character of conservation equations. Calculations were carried out for the following control parameters: the porous/fluid thermal conductivity ratio (1 <= Rk(P1) <= 100), the Darcy and Rayleigh numbers (10(-1) <= Da <= 10(-6), 10(3) <= Ra <= 10(6)), the first porous-cover thickness (0.05 <= e(1) <= 0.3), and the separation distance between components (0.2 <= S <= 1) to highlight their influence on the cooling process. The results show that under specific values of the Darcy and Rayleigh numbers and in the limiting case of a high value of the porous/fluid thermal conductivity ratio (Rk(P1) = 100), a decrease in the maximum components temperature, up to 95%, is observed by increasing the porous-cover thickness from 0.05 to 0.3. In addition, by increasing the permeability, the Rayleigh number or the separation distance, an improvement in the cooling process of the two components greater than or equal to 22% is achieved.