Three-Dimensional Numerical Study on Forced Convection Heat Transfer in Structured Packed Porous Media

A three-dimensional forced convection heat transfer inside small pores of structured porous media with spherical particles is numerically studied in this paper. The Navier-Stokes equations and RNG k-ε turbulent model with scalable wall function are adopted for the computations. The effects of Reynolds number and packing form on the performances of forced convection heat transfer in porous media are investigated in detail. The results show that,with the same physical parameters,the pressure drops in porous media with proper packing form can be greatly reduced and the overall heat transfer efficiencies are significantly im-proved. The traditional empirical correlations are unavailable for the structured packed porous media and some modifications are required. Furthermore,it is found that,with different packing forms,the overall heat transfer performance of SC packing is the best,and with the same packing form,the overall heat transfer per-formance of uniform packing is much better than that of the non-uniform packing.