Effect of Turbulence on Forced Convection in a Composite Tube Partly Filled with a Porous Medium

摘要

An engineering approach to modeling turbulent fluid flow and heat transfer in composite porous/fluid domains is suggested. Comparisons of critical values of the Reynolds number for the clear fluid and porous domains shows that if the permeability of the porous region is sufficiently small (which is probably true for most practical porous media), the flow in the porous region remains laminar even if the flow in the clear fluid region is turbulent. The problem is then reduced to matching the laminar flow solution in the porous region with the turbulent flow solution in the clear fluid region. The major assumption of this approach is that the flow in the porous domain is laminar. This assumption must be checked for a particular flow situation before the suggested method can be utilized.