Modeling and Numerical Simulation of Concentrated Solar Energy Storage in a Packed Bed of Silicon Carbide Particles

In this paper, a radiative heat transfer model is developed and a computational fluid dynamics approach is used to simulate concentrated solar energy (CSE) absorption by a packed bed of silicon carbide (SiC). Radiative heat transfer plays a very important role when the temperature is high, such as the temperature of a medium upon receiving radiative CSE. In this work, the radiative heat transfer in our packed bed was modeled as an effective conductivity based on the Breitbach and Barthels study. For conductive heat transfer, heat is transferred by the contact area between particles and gas near the contact surface. Here, we used the Zehner-Bauer-Schliinder conductivity model to calculate the effective thermal conductivity. We considered a two-dimensional model, and ANSYS Fluent 16.1 was used to conduct our numerical simulations. The result of our two-dimensional simulation agreed well with the literature data on temperature measurements of SiC particles in a packed bed.

Automated summary

In this study, a radiative heat transfer model was developed and computational fluid dynamics were used to simulate concentrated solar energy absorption by a packed bed of silicon carbide. The effective conductivity for radiative heat transfer in the packed bed was modeled based on the study by Breitbach and Barthels, while the Zehner-Bauer-Schliinder conductivity model was used to calculate effective thermal conductivity. The two-dimensional numerical simulations with ANSYS Fluent 16.1 were in good agreement with literature data on temperature measurements of SiC particles in the packed bed.