The flow and heat transfer fields from a nanofluid within a horizontal annulus partly saturated with a porous region are examined by the Galerkin weighted residual finite element technique scheme. The inner and the outer circular boundaries have hot and cold temperatures, respectively. Impacts of the wide ranges of the Darcy number, porosity, dimensionless length of the porous layer, and nanoparticle volume fractions on the streamlines, isotherms, and isentropic distributions are investigated. The primary outcomes revealed that the stream function value is powered by increasing the Darcy parameter and porosity and reduced by growing the porous region's area. The Bejan number and the average temperature are reduced by the increase in Da, porosity ε, and nanoparticles volume fractions ϕ. The heat transfer through the nanofluid-porous layer was determined to be the best toward high rates of Darcy number, porosity, and volume fraction of nanofluid. Further, the local velocity and local temperature in the interface surface between nanofluid-porous layers obtain high values at the smallest area from the porous region (D=0.4), and in contrast, the local heat transfer takes the lower value.
Keywords: Darcy-Forchheimer model; entropy production; horizontal annulus; nanofluid-porous cavity; natural convection.