Accurate prediction of the effective radial conductivity of highly conductive honeycomb monoliths with square channels

In the last 15 years, two-dimensional heterogeneous pseudocontinuous models have been successfully used to simulate the performances of washcoated honeycomb monoliths, with remarkable savings in computational effort with respect to discrete models. The adequacy of such models relies on accurate expressions for the estimate of the effective axial and radial thermal conductivities of the structured catalyst. It is shown that available literature correlations for the calculation of the effective radial conductivity suffer from a series of shortcomings. A novel enhanced engineering correlation for the prediction of the effective radial conductivity is proposed and compared with existing correlations. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.