Thermal assessment of a convective porous moving fins of different material properties using Laplace-variational iterative method

Investigation on thermal responses of different materials subjected to variant environmental condition has been a subject of ever-increasing research interest for decades. As such, research studies have shown different materials exhibiting peculiar characteristics of commercially used heat enhancement devices. Therefore, this work presents an investigation on thermal behaviour of a convective porous moving fins with temperature dependent thermal conductivity for five different materials. These materials include copper, Aluminium, Silicon nitride, Silicon carbide and Stainless steel. A hybrid method, viz- Laplace-variational iterative method (LVIM) is used to solve the model equation developed. And a perfect agreement is achieved when the result obtained from LVIM is verified with the exact solution. The result obtained shows that silicon carbide compete favourably with copper as the most efficient material in heat enhancement, while stainless steel shows the least performance. It is hoped that this work will serve as a template and a helpful tool for both scientist and engineers’ in future design of fins.