Forced convection heat transfer in structure packed beds: packing form and particle shape

A forced convection heat transfer inside micro pores of structure packed beds with spherical or ellipsoidal particles are numerically studied in this paper. Three-dimensional Navier Stokes equations and RNG k-ε turbulent model with scalable wall function are adopted for present computations. The effects of packing form and particle shape are investigated in detail. The macroscopic hydrodynamic and heat transfer results are obtained from micro pore cells by using integrating method. The results show that, with the same physical parameters, the pressure drops in structure packed beds are much lower than those in randomly packed beds while the overall heat transfer efficiencies (except SC packing) are much higher. The traditional correlations of flow and heat transfer extracted from randomly packings are unavailable for structured packings, and some modified correlations are obtained. Furthermore, it finds that, with the same particle shape (sphere), the overall heat transfer performance of SC packing is the best and with the same packing form (FCC), the overall heat transfer performance of packing with long ellipsoidal particles is the best