A model for the conduction shape factor in spherical void phase porous materials

This article presents a method for determining the conduction shape factor for complex porous media by performing pore-level simulations on the solid phase of mathematically-generated geometric models. The shape factor is a geometric property and does not depend on the thermophysical properties of the material or the interstitial fluid. The shape factor is established for several geometric variations of permeable, spherical-void-phase porous materials using a direct computational approach and it is shown that there is a dependency on both the porosity and pore diameter. We also show that the shape factor can be characterized by a quadratic expression that is in terms of porosity and mean pore diameter. The results are validated directly by comparing computations of conjugate heat transfer done using pore-level and volume-averaged approaches. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This study presents a method for determining the conduction shape factor for complex porous media by performing pore-level simulations on mathematically-generated geometric models. The shape factor is found to be dependent on both porosity and pore diameter, and can be characterized by a quadratic expression. The results are validated by comparing computations of conjugate heat transfer using pore-level and volume-averaged approaches.