Computational study on fluid flow and heat transfer characteristic of hollow structured packed bed

The development of advanced packed beds has remarkable applications in the design of new equipment for related industries. Recently, a hybrid of the structured and random packed beds is proposed-the hollow structured packed bed (HSPB), which can be easily formed with ordered ring structures and a free channel along the center-line by the particle self-assembly feature in a random packed bed at 2 < D/d < 3. In this study, the pore scale CFD simulation is performed to investigate the fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics of the HSPB. It can be observed that, among the HSPB tested in the current work, both pressure drop and heat transfer decrease with varying degrees by increasing the D/d ratios and the packed bed with the largest D/d ratio has the highest overall heat transfer efficiency. Compared with random packed beds and a structured packed bed in simple cubic packing, the HSPB reduces the pressure drop effectively and enhanced the heat transfer capacity than the structured packed bed, which make the HSPB superior than the two typical packing forms on the overall heat transfer efficiency. Together with the convenience in construction, the HSPB is very suitable for industrial applications with the rapid heat removal and low pressure drop requirement. Moreover, affected by the packing structure, the fluid flow velocity and temperature distribution in the HSPB have some unique features. The formation is therefore discussed in this study as well. These findings are helpful in the design of new equipment using the RSPB as well as understanding transport phenomena in packed beds. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.