On the mechanism of turbulent heat transfer in composite porous-fluid systems with finite length porous blocks: Effect of porosity and Reynolds number

Abstract

The majority of literature studies on composite porous-fluid systems involve fully-developed porous channel flows where the porous media covers the whole length of the channel. These studies utilized periodic boundary conditions at the inlet and outlet. In these systems, the stagnation at the frontal face of the porous block, turbulent separation bubble over the porous-fluid interface, and flow leakage from the porous to non-porous regions do not exist. The existence of these flow features in the case of a finite porous block immersed in a channel flow modifies turbulent interactions across the porous-fluid interface. In contrast to the previous studies, this paper investigates the flow and thermal characteristics of turbulent channel flow containing a porous block with a finite length. To this end, pore-scale large eddy simulations are performed in composite porous-fluid systems with two porosities (53% and 91%) at three Reynolds numbers of 3600, 7200 and 14400. Flow visualization shows that two distinct regions are formed over the interface in low-porosity cases: Region#1 near the leading edge with organised hairpin structures and high flow leakage; Region#2 away from the leading edge with unorganised hairpin structures and lower flow leakage. In region#1, maximum turbulent fluctuations occur far away from the interface while they approach the interface in region#2. The results showed that by increasing either the Reynolds number or porous length, the location of maximum turbulence statistics approaches the interface. This observation supports earlier findings for fully-developed porous channel flows which are only valid in region#2. Whereas, with a low Reynolds number or a short porous length, the turbulent statistics peak far from the interface, consistent with the observations in region#1. Besides, it was found that increasing the porosity and Reynolds number reduces the flow leakage (from the porous region to the non-porous region) up to 50% and 10%, respectively, which in turn disrupts the patterns of contour-rotating vortex pairs and hairpin structures over the interface. It is further found that for a fixed Reynolds number, the overall Nusselt number for the high-porosity case is 2.6 times higher than that of the low-porosity case. The pressure drop for the low-porosity cases is 1.8 times more than that for the high-porosity cases.