Heat Transfer—Asian Research, 00 (0), 2014 Numerical Investigation of Double Diffusive Mixed Convection Laminar Flow in Two Sided Lid Driven Porous Cavity Lokesh Agarwal, A. Satheesh, and C.G. Mohan School of Mechanical and Building Sciences, VIT University, Vellore – 632014, Tamil Nadu, India This paper presents the numerical study of mixed convection in a two-sided lid driven porous cavity due to temperature and concentration gradients. The top and bottom walls are stationary and insulated. The left and right walls are moving at an equal velocity (V o ) in the same direction. The temperature and concentration are kept high at the right wall and low at the left wall. The governing equations are discretized using fnite volume method. The pressure–velocity coupling is performed by the SIM- PLE algorithm. A third order differed QUICK scheme is applied at the inner nodes and a second order central difference scheme is used at the boundary nodes. The fow behavior and heat transfer are analyzed for different nondimensional numbers, such as, 1 × 10 -4 ≤ Ri ≤ 10, 1 × 10 -4 ≤ Da ≤ 0.1 and 0.7 < Pr < 10. The present numeri- cal results are compared with the literature and are in good agreement. For the above selected nondimensional numbers, the heat and fuid fow behavior is investigated using local and average Nusselt (Nu) and Sherwood (Sh) numbers. Results show that the convection fow is signifcant up to Da = 0.1, beyond that the effect of porosity is negligible. The effect of Prandtl number (Pr) on average Nu is found to increase sig- nifcantly. C⃝ 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Heat Trans Asian Res 00(0): 1–19, 2014; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/htj). DOI 10.1002/htj.21123 Key words: double diffusive, porous media, mixed convection, two sided lid-driven cavity 1. Introduction Convection is a very important phenomenon in heat transfer applications and it occurs due to two different gradients, such as, temperature and concentration. When convection governs the fuid fow then the problem becomes interesting, as the rate of convection due to one gradient is different in magnitude and direction than the other gradient. The temperature and concentration gradient creates the buoyancy effects and hence the convection is called double-diffusive convection. It is very interesting to note that the rate of heat diffusion is nearly 80 times faster than salt [1] which emphasizes that double-diffusive convection is very complex. If the natural convection is accompanied with forced convection then the rate of heat transfer and fuid fow inside the cavity becomes much more interesting. Double-diffusive convection has numerous applications in natural and technological processes, such as, distribution of salt in solar ponds, oceans, growth of crystals, solar energy systems, welding processes, thermal insulation, if the medium is porous, then in food C⃝ 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1