Pore-scale numerical simulation and LTNE analysis for fully-developed forced convective heat transfer in packed beds of mono-sized rough spheres covering near-wall and core regions

Abstract

This work presents a novel method to acquire the effective convection heat transfer coefficients on the interfaces of wall-fluid contacts and sphere-fluid in both the near-wall region and core region of sphere-packed beds. Pore-scale numerical simulations are first conducted for different porosities pertaining to two regular body-centered cubic and face-centered cubic packings, packing lattice angles, inflow velocities, and ratios of the thermal conductivities of the solid and fluid. A finite-thickness metal reactor wall is included in the pore-scale simulation to make the heating boundary conditions more realistic. The outer surface of the metal wall is subjected to a uniform heat flux. The heat then passes through the metal wall and dispenses into the solid and liquid phases of the packed bed through the wall-sphere and the wall-fluid interfaces at the inner wall according to the physical mechanisms. Within the reactor, the heat transfer mechanism is separately considered in the near-wall region and the core region due to the intrinsic differences in the flow pattern. For each packing, different inflow angles are examined and exhibit different flow patterns and heat transfer performances. After the whole domain is hydrodynamically and thermally fully-developed, the local effective convection heat transfer coefficients can then be calculated. These coefficients reflect the realistic local convection either on the reactor wall or on the sphere-fluid interface. These convection heat transfer coefficients, along with the effective solid thermal conductivity through the contacting spheres obtained in our previous work, are implanted into a modified two-equation LTNE model. This modified LTNE model yields linear longitudinal fully-developed temperature distributions within the reactor having discrepancies in the temperature slopes less than ±10% from those by the pore-scale numerical simulations. In contrast, the conventional model even fails to reach linear distributions of the solid- and liquid-phase temperatures, which are expected for fully-developed packed-bed flows.