The phenomena of natural convection in a fluid-saturated porous medium were studied experimentally for a wide range of Rayleigh number. The experiments were carried out in a rectangular glass tank of very small width to facilitate flow visualization. Mixtures of glass beads and distilled water were used as a porous bed. The bed was heated from below and cooled from above, and the flow was visualized by photographing dye streaks.
A theoretical analysis was also included to simulated the experimental results. In the analysis the thin rectangular box was thought of a fin losing heat to the surroundings in order to examine the effect of lateral heat losses.
The experimental results contain both quantitative information on the temperature fields and flow visualizations on the various convective flow patterns. The convective flow behavior of the numerical simulation was qualitatively identical to that of the experiment.