Introduction

Porous media can be found in many natural systems and engineering applications. Examples include beach sand, human lungs, bread, gravel, soil, and rock, and engineering applications include packed bed reactors, fiberglass insulation, thermal energy storage systems, electronic cooling, crude oil extraction, and nuclear reactors, and the list goes on. For many of these applications, depending on the flow regime, buoyancy effects can play a role in the heat transfer rates, and many of them comprise a porous medium bounded from above by a fluid layer. The general framework of this investigation of mixed convection in fluid-superposed porous layers described in this monograph is established. Prior research addresses natural, forced, and mixed convection in porous layers, and heat transfer correlations have been established based on a blend of experimentation and numerical analysis.