Coupled heat and mass transfer from a sphere buried in an infinite porous medium

With the knowledge accumulated from previous studies on convective heat transfer in porous media, considerable attention has now turned to a more sophisticated problem that takes into account the mass transfer effects. The phenomenon has many important applications in energy-related engineering problems, for example, the cooling of nuclear reactors and the underground disposal of nuclear wastes. The purpose of this study is to analyze practically important problem of natural convection induced by the combined action of temperature and concentration gradients from a buried sphere. The approach is parallel to that of a previous author. However, more complicated boundary conditions, i.e. combination of different thermal and concentration boundary conditions, are considered. Emphasis has been placed on a fundamental examination of these effects on the flow, temperature and concentration fields. (author)