FORCED CONVECTION IN A SINTERED POROUS CHANNEL WITH INLET AND OUTLET SLOTS - NUMERICAL STUDY AND EXPERIMENTAL COMPARISON

摘要

A detailed numerical investigation of two-dimensional laminar forced convection in a sintered porous channel with inlet and outlet slots was performed. This configuration was developed for a new pumped single-phase porous metal heat exchanger. Hydrodynamic and heat transfer results were generated for a typical unit cell (i.e., slot-fed porous channel) of the configuration that has inlet and outlet slots on one wall and a uniform heating on the other wall. The flow in the porous medium was modeled using the Brinkman-Forchheimer-extended Darcy model in which the inertia and boundary effects were taken into consideration. The effects of thermal dispersion were included in the energy equation. Very good agreement was found between the present numerical predictions and the corresponding experimental measurements. Parametric studies were conducted to evaluate the effects of particle diameter, particle Reynolds number, and channel dimensions including height and slot width. Length-averaged Nusselt number and friction factor correlations were developed for efficient design of a porous metal heat exchanger based on the present configuration.