Simulation of conjugate heat transfer between fluid-saturated porous media and solid wall

Sheng Chen

doi:10.1016/j.ijthermalsci.2017.10.039

Abstract

Conjugate heat transfer between fluid-saturated porous media and solid walls is an important issue in many disciplines. For traditional numerical techniques, it is still a great challenge to treat conjugate problems, especially with complicated interfaces. In the present work, a new numerical approach, based on the lattice Boltzmann (LB) method, is proposed to address such challenge. In the present approach no explicit special treatment on coupled interfaces between fluid-saturated porous media and solid walls is required. Moreover, no additional source term, which exists in the available LB models, is required. It can guarantee that the simplicity, accuracy and stability of the present model are better than those models. The accuracy and reliability of the present approach are validated by three nontrivial benchmark tests. The excellent agreement with previous published data demonstrates its feasibility and simplicity for modelling conjugate heat transfer with complicated interfaces between fluid-saturated porous media and solid walls. The present work takes a single-relaxation-time model for example to address conjugate heat transfer problems and its multiple-relaxation-time counterpart can be established straightforwardly in the same way.

Highlights

Conjugate heat transfer between fluid-saturated porous media and solid walls is an important issue in many disciplines, such as environment and building engineering, energy engineering and biomedical engineering, since in many applications of these disciplines fluid-saturated porous media and solid walls co-exist[1,2,3]
The available literature on numerically modelling conjugate heat transfer between fluid-saturated porous media and solid walls may fall into two categories: (1) solid walls embedded in fluid-saturated porous media and (2) fluid-saturated porous media bounded by solid walls
Conjugate heat transfer between fluid-saturated porous media and solid walls is commonly found in many practical applications

Summary

Introduction

Conjugate heat transfer between fluid-saturated porous media and solid walls is an important issue in many disciplines, such as environment and building engineering, energy engineering and biomedical engineering, since in many applications of these disciplines fluid-saturated porous media and solid walls co-exist[1,2,3]. The purpose of the present work is to bridge the above gap since an efficient REV scale model for conjugate heat transfer between fluid-saturated porous media and solid walls is very crucial in a lot of practical applications, such as solidification processes, modern building thermal insulators and cooling hot intrusions in a geological setting [1,3]. In Section, the macroscopic governing equations for conjugate heat transfer between fluid-saturated porous media and solid walls, at the REV scale, are presented. The complexity to explicitly treat the interfaces between fluid-saturated porous media and solid walls, which is a great challenge for the popularly used numerical methods [1,2,3,15,16,17,18,19], can be avoided.

LB evolving equation

Multiscale expansion and recovered macroscopic equations

Numerical validation

Conjugate natural convection in a square fluid-saturated porous cavity

Conclusion