Particle-to-fluid heat transfer coefficients in miniporous media

The heat transfer between the solid particles and the fluid in a miniporous media was studied experimentally and numerically. The experimental test section was a sintered bronze porous media with an average particle diameter of 0.2 mm. Particle-to-fluid heat transfer coefficients in the miniporous media were determined experimentally using a transient single-blow technique. A Jumped capacitance method (method 1) was used to calculate the particle-to-fluid heat transfer coefficients from the experimental data. The particle-to-fluid heat transfer coefficients were also calculated from a one-dimensional numerical analysis of the experimental data (method 2) which has been used by many researchers. The experimental results for h(sf) using the two methods agreed very well. Therefore, method I is also deemed acceptable and much simpler than method 2. Three-dimensional numerical simulations using the CFD code FLUENT was also used to predict the particle-to-fluid heat transfer coefficients and to provide details of the fluid flow inside the miniporous media. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.