Hi,

How to model porous media with heat transfer.I have a problem of heating of working fluid. Heated air enters the fuild into a chamber filled with solids of regular shape and flows through it. The meshing of gaps between this gaps is difficult. What I want is to use porous media approximation with heat transfer. Also there is another stream of fluid which is heated by air.

Any guidance and references will be very helpfull.

Thanks in Advance

Apurva Shukla

Apurva,

Heat transfer in porous media may be treated as follow.

Suppose Tf and Ts represent the fluid and solid temperature fields. The volumetric convective heat transfer at any location within the porous medium may be written as hv*(Ts-Tf), where hv is the volumetric HTC (Heat Transfer Coefficient). This hv should be modeled according to the porous medium microstructure, usually by correlations to experiments. The correlations are typically in put the form Nu=c*Re^m*Pr^n, where Nu, Re and Pr are Nusselt, Reynolds and Prandtl numbers, and c, m, n are the correlation parameters related to the porous medium structure. From this, the HTC, h, may be calculated. Then you may find hv by assuming hv= (A/V)*h, where A/V is the specific area-to-volume ratio of a representative elementary volume, relating the effective heat transfer area to the volume.

I hope this helps,

Rami